Understanding IPA: The Pronunciation System That Works for Every Language
At some point in learning a language you can recognize a word on the page, know what it means, and still have no idea how it sounds. Spelling is a set of local conventions, and each language settled on its own.
English settled on some bad ones. The letters "ough" have at least six pronunciations (though, through, rough, cough, bough, thought), and the letter "a" stands for four different vowels in "father," "cat," "ball," and "about." A second language adds a second set of conventions for the same letters: German "w" is the sound English writes as "v."
The International Phonetic Alphabet gives each sound one symbol and keeps that symbol for that sound in Portuguese, Thai, Norwegian, or any other language. Your dictionary already prints it, in the bracketed line after the headword that you may have been skipping.
What IPA is
The International Phonetic Alphabet is a set of symbols for speech sounds. The International Phonetic Association, founded in 1886, published the first version in 1888 and still maintains it. Each symbol stands for one sound and keeps that value in every language, so a transcription tells you how to pronounce a word whatever its spelling system.
The alphabet started with language teachers. In 1886 the phonetician Paul Passy and a group of French and British teachers in Paris formed the Phonetic Teachers' Association. They wanted to teach pronunciation, the ordinary spelling of English and French kept getting in the way, and so they printed their journal in a phonetic script. At first members used different letter values for different languages. In 1888 the association published one alphabet with fixed values for all languages, the first version of the IPA. The group took the name International Phonetic Association in 1897.
English "ship," French "chat," and German "Schiff" start with the same sound, and each language spells it differently: sh, ch, sch. IPA writes /ʃ/ for all three. The symbol records what your tongue and lips do and ignores the spelling rules each country inherited.
IPA works at two levels of detail. Broad transcription, between slashes like /pɪn/, records only the distinctions that change meaning in that language. Narrow transcription, in square brackets like [pʰɪn], adds physical detail on top: aspiration, exact vowel quality, small things speakers do without noticing. Dictionaries print broad transcription. Phoneticians use narrow transcription to describe one specific pronunciation.
That split means "the same symbol everywhere" needs a caveat, because broad transcription is relative to the language. English and Spanish both write /p/, but the English /p/ at the start of "pin" comes with a puff of air, and the Spanish one in "pino" has none. Neither language uses that puff to tell words apart, so both write /p/. The puff still matters to you as a learner: carry it into Spanish and you sound English, and a broad transcription won't warn you about it.
How to read the IPA consonant chart
The official chart arranges the consonants in a grid. The columns give place of articulation, where your lips or tongue block the air, running from the lips on the left to the glottis on the right. The rows give manner of articulation: you stop the air completely (/p/, /t/, /k/), squeeze it through a narrow gap (/f/, /s/, /ʃ/), send it through the nose (/m/, /n/), or narrow the passage without friction (/l/, /j/).
When two symbols share a cell, they differ only in voicing. Your vocal folds vibrate for the one on the right and stay still for the one on the left. /p/ and /b/, /f/ and /v/, /s/ and /z/ pair up this way, and so do /θ/ and /ð/, the two sounds English spells "th" in "thin" and "then." Put a finger on your throat, say a long /s/ and then a long /z/, and you can feel the buzz switch on.
Most consonant symbols are the Latin letter you would expect, with the value you would expect. The unfamiliar ones stand for sounds your own language lacks, and those are the sounds you are most likely mispronouncing now.
How to read the IPA vowel chart
Vowels give you no contact point to feel. Your tongue moves through a continuous space, and IPA maps that space onto a quadrilateral. Height runs top to bottom, from close vowels like /i/ with the tongue high to open vowels like /a/ with the jaw lowered. Backness runs left to right, with front vowels on the left. The chart slants because your tongue has more room to move front and back when it is high than when it is low.
The reference points around the edge are the cardinal vowels, which belong to no particular language. Daniel Jones set them out in 1917. He defined the corner vowels by extreme tongue positions and the others as equal steps by ear between them, and he recorded them on gramophone disc so phoneticians could train their ears against one standard. Linguists place a language's vowels relative to these points, and that shared frame lets you compare a Finnish /e/ with a Spanish /e/.
The letter "a" shows why the chart helps. In British Received Pronunciation, English uses it for /æ/ in "cat," /ɑː/ in "father," /ɔː/ in "ball," and /ə/ in "about." Spanish and Italian use "a" for /a/ and nothing else. Vowel inventories differ as much as spellings do. Descriptions of RP usually count about 20 vowel phonemes (twelve monophthongs and eight diphthongs), and counts for General American vary with the analysis. Spanish and Japanese have five, Italian seven. An English speaker learning Spanish has fewer vowels to manage than at home, while a Spanish speaker learning English has to split the space around one /a/ into several vowels.
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See the translation, every change, and the why on one screen.
Open AppWhy your dictionary uses IPA
You have probably read IPA already. Oxford, Cambridge, Collins, and Duden print it, and so do most bilingual dictionaries published in Europe. Merriam-Webster is the well-known exception: its main American dictionaries use a house respelling system. Its learner's dictionary, now published as the Britannica Dictionary, uses IPA, since its readers are not native speakers who can decode a respelling.
The full chart has 107 letters plus several dozen diacritics and suprasegmental marks, and that number puts people off a system they could learn in an afternoon. You need a fraction of it. You will not need the click consonants of Xhosa unless you learn Xhosa. You need the sound inventory of your target language, usually somewhere between 20 and 50 symbols once you count length and stress marks. Learn those and you can read that language's dictionary entries, including decades-old ones, which use the same system with a few symbols the association has since revised.
How to learn IPA without overlearning it
Skip the full chart. Look up the sound inventory of the language you are learning and count how many of its symbols are ordinary letters with their usual values. Then learn the unfamiliar ones one at a time, since they mark the sounds your mouth hasn't made yet.
For English speakers the list is short. /ɲ/ is Spanish "ñ" and French and Italian "gn," close to the "ny" in "canyon" but made as one sound instead of /n/ followed by /j/. /ʁ/ is the uvular r of French and of most German speakers, made at the back of the mouth, far from any English r. /ç/ is the German "ich" sound, which English speakers often replace with /ʃ/. In the other direction, /θ/ and /ð/ are rare among the world's languages, and learners of English struggle with them. Tone needs its own notation: IPA marks it with diacritics or with tone letters such as ˥ and ˩, though most learners of Mandarin meet tone through Pinyin's accent marks instead.
Then use it every time you look up a word: read the transcription before the definition, and say the word aloud. It is the same habit described in how to use a translator to learn a language. After a few weeks you read the symbols as letters, the way the letters of a new script stop looking like drawings.
How Fink uses IPA
Fink shows a pronunciation line in the Insights panel under each translation. For the thirteen supported languages written in Latin script (Czech, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese), that line is broad IPA without the slashes.
For the ten languages in other scripts, Fink uses a standard romanization or transliteration instead: Hepburn with macrons for Japanese, Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks for Chinese, Revised Romanization for Korean, RTGS for Thai, ALA-LC for Arabic and Persian, IAST for Bengali and Hindi, ISO 843 for Greek, and BGN/PCGN for Ukrainian. The prompt names the scheme on every request, so the output keeps one convention. English gets a pronunciation line only when it is the source text, in Received Pronunciation or General American depending on the variant you picked.
Summary
IPA gives each speech sound one symbol with a fixed value. The International Phonetic Association has maintained it since it published the first version in 1888. For any one language you need its inventory, a few dozen symbols, and with those you can read the pronunciation line in that language's dictionaries.
Questions people ask about IPA
Do I need to learn all 107 letters? No. The chart covers the consonants and vowels that phoneticians have found languages using to distinguish words, and any one language uses a small share of them. Learn the ones your target language uses.
Is IPA the same as phonetic spelling? No. Phonetic respelling approximates a word with ordinary letters, like "fuh-NET-ik" for "phonetic." It only works if you know how the respelling's language pronounces those letters, so a respelling written for English speakers misleads a French reader. IPA symbols have fixed values whatever your first language is, and learner's dictionaries use IPA for that reason.
Why do learners of Japanese and Chinese use romanization instead of IPA? Someone who can't read kana or hanzi yet already knows the Latin alphabet, and their textbooks and dictionaries print Hepburn or Pinyin. Pinyin marks the four Mandarin tones with accents over the vowel. Hepburn marks long vowels with macrons and leaves Japanese pitch accent unmarked.
Does IPA show regional accents? Broad transcription follows one reference accent and leaves regional detail out. English dictionaries name their variety: British ones use Received Pronunciation, American ones General American. Narrow transcription can record any accent in as much detail as you need.
Sources and further reading
The chart itself, and the reference work behind it, are published by the International Phonetic Association: the IPA chart and the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. The founding story (Paris, 1886, the Phonetic Teachers' Association, the shared alphabet of 1888, and the renaming in 1897) is documented in the history of the alphabet and in the biography of Paul Passy. The vowel reference points come from Daniel Jones and his cardinal vowel system of 1917. For the dictionaries, see the pronunciation guides published by Oxford Learner's Dictionaries and Cambridge, and the Britannica Dictionary's IPA guide; Merriam-Webster's main dictionaries use their own respelling instead. The look-up habit is described in how to use a translator to learn a language.