The IPA: International Phonetic Awesomeness
Phonetic Concepts #2
Regular readers of my posts will know that much of the inspiration for my writing comes from my work as a spoken English coach, largely working with multilingual professionals. You’ll also probably know that my original training is in phonetics, so it will come as no surprise that the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is one of my favourite things. It forms the foundation of effective speech training, linguistic research and language instruction methodology - it is, effectively, the periodic table of human speech.
Origins
The IPA developed as a direct response to practical communication challenges in the late 19th century. Prior to its creation, describing pronunciation across languages lacked standardisation – presenting significant obstacles for language teachers and learners alike.
The foundation was laid in Paris, 1886, when a group of language teachers led by French linguist Paul Passy formed the Phonetic Teachers' Association. Their objective was to create a standardised alphabet capable of consistently representing the sounds of any human language. As linguist David Crystal notes, they sought "a notation that would be accurate, comprehensive and economical".
The early IPA underwent several revisions, with significant updates in 1900, 1932, and more recently in 1993 and 2005. These modifications progressively developed the system into what we recognise today – a methodically designed set of symbols representing precise articulations of sounds produced by the human vocal apparatus.
Technical Precision and Universality
What distinguishes the IPA in pronunciation training is its universal application. Unlike conventional alphabets tied to specific languages, each IPA symbol represents exactly one sound, and each sound has exactly one symbol – without exceptions.
The IPA organises sounds based on their physiological production – tongue position, vocal fold vibration, manner of articulation and so on. It is in this way that it is very similar to the periodic table of the elements, with sounds grouped by shared characteristics.
The value of the IPA lies, to a large extent, in its precision, providing a one-to-one relationship between what we write and what we hear. It also provides us with a considerable degree of flexibility in terms of the granularity with which we can describe what we hear. For instance, we can use the extensive set of ‘diacritics’ to provide a very narrow description of exactly what sounds an individual produced in a single utterance, or we can keep it simple and provide a broad transcription of the ‘typical’ or phonemic representation of words.
Consider the letter 'a' in English – it manifests differently in ‘cat’, ‘father’, and ‘make’. In the IPA, these can be transcribed phonemically using distinct symbols: /æ/, /ɑ/, and /ɛɪ/ (or /eɪ/ depending on who you ask). But, we can take it a step further, as we know that typically speakers would slightly lengthen the (first) vowel in ‘father’, so we can in fact transcribe this as /ɑ:/, with the colon denoting it is longer. If we want to go even further, we could analyse an individual’s speech and note that not only do they lengthen the /ɑ/ vowel, but also tend to articulate it with a nasal quality, in which case we might descriptively transcribe it as /ɑ̃ː/.
Why Is This Useful?
From the perspective of improving your English pronunciation, the IPA has numerous benefits.
If we take the consonants, for example, the IPA gives us a roadmap with instructions. If you take the time to understand what the places and manners of articulation are, you should be able - with practice - to physically articulate every speech sound (not just in English). Pair this with a good dictionary that provides IPA transcription for words and you are set for life (see my article on this).
But you can also draw parallels between your first and other languages, spot likely pinch points, and make minor adjustments.
Take Polish, for instance. At first glance, there are no ‘t’ or ‘d’ or ‘s’ or ‘z’ sounds on the Polish inventory, but these are really common sounds in English. But looking a bit closer, we can see that while Polish doesn’t have the /t/, /d/, /s/ and /z/ phonemes present in English, it does have /t̪/, /d̪/, /s̪/ and /z̪/. The diacritic below the symbols here denotes that the sound is dental - that is, the tip of the tongue is touching the back of the teeth, while in English the tongue doesn’t quite touch the teeth but sits slightly behind, touching the alveolar ridge (the ridge of gum behind your top teeth). In reality, the difference between the dental version and the alveolar version is barely audible to native English speakers, so there’s no point spending a lot of time perfecting this. But if you did want to, understanding the IPA would give you an immediate instruction on how to adjust your Polish sounds to create accurate English sounds.
By way of a ‘vowel’ example, we find that many Romance languages make heavy use of the /a/ vowel, which is typically produced with the tongue low and relatively forward in the mouth. This vowel does a lot of heavy lifting in these languages, so there seems (anecdotally) to be a fair bit of leeway in the range of acoustic profiles this sound can have.
In English, though, we don’t really use this sound. Instead, we have three different sounds that all hang out pretty close to the /a/ in the mouth - /æ/, /ʌ/ and /ɑ/ (found in the words ‘cat’, ‘cut’ and ‘cart’ respectively) - and which, for speakers of Romance languages, all tend to get sucked into the gravity well of the /a/ sound leading to issues with perception and production.
Having a map of these four sounds, as we do with a vowel plot labelled with IPA symbols, guides the learner from a familiar sound to the new sounds, with a very clear visual instruction to move the tongue further forward/up for /æ/, further up for /ʌ/ and further back for /ɑ/ to create a clear distinction between these three vowels and the /a/ in their first language.
Limitations?
It would be remiss not to acknowledge certain limitations of the IPA in practical application. The specialised symbols present an initial learning curve. Some argue that simplified pronunciation guides are more accessible for casual language learners without dedicated professional guidance.
Critics also note that the IPA, despite revisions, retains some Eurocentric biases in its structure and organisation. Additionally, it can struggle to capture some of the more nuanced aspects of pronunciation, particularly certain prosodic features that vary across languages.
I find these limitations are generally outweighed by the system's benefits, particularly when working with clients who require precise, consistent guidance for professional or academic purposes. I also find that my clients, at least, find the IPA a refreshing improvement on English spelling, which adds a certain motivation to take the time to learn it.
The Future
The digital era has significantly enhanced IPA accessibility for practitioners. Unicode integration means we can readily incorporate IPA symbols into teaching materials, a development that has been ongoing since Unicode's early versions. Interactive tools have made demonstrating and using the IPA more practical in coaching sessions.
Recent developments in computational linguistics are expanding how we use the IPA professionally. Researchers are developing automated phonetic analysis tools that can generate precise IPA transcriptions from audio samples, potentially offering new possibilities for assessment and feedback in pronunciation training, but from what I’ve seen these have some distance to go before they are accurate enough to be useful.
Conclusion
The International Phonetic Alphabet, with its 107 segmental letters plus numerous diacritics and suprasegmental markers, represents one of the most significant achievements in linguistic science. In my years working in phonetics and pronunciation coaching, I have found no better tool for helping clients understand and reproduce the sounds of English with precision and confidence.
While technology continues to advance, offering new ways to analyse and represent speech, the fundamental brilliance of the IPA lies in its elegant solution to a complex problem - providing a universal, consistent framework for describing the sounds that humans can produce.
For professionals working with speech and language, the investment in learning this system pays dividends through enhanced analytical capability and instructional clarity. For learners, it offers an escape from the notorious inconsistencies of English spelling and a direct pathway to accurate pronunciation.
The IPA remains, as it has for over a century, the gold standard for phonetic representation - a testament to the enduring value of systematic, thoughtful approaches to understanding human communication.
