What is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)?

Phonetics And Word Formation Questions Medium



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What is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)?

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation that represents the sounds of human speech. It was developed by the International Phonetic Association in order to provide a standardized way of transcribing the sounds of all languages. The IPA uses a set of symbols to represent individual speech sounds, known as phonemes, as well as diacritics to indicate variations in pronunciation. This alphabet allows linguists, language learners, and speech pathologists to accurately describe and analyze the sounds of any language, regardless of its writing system. The IPA is widely used in fields such as linguistics, phonetics, and language teaching to provide a consistent and precise representation of speech sounds.