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Frequently asked questions

The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use a normal pronunciation key?

The IPA is the international standard for phonetic transcription, and therefore the Wikipedia standard as well. Many non-American and/or EFL-oriented dictionaries and pedagogical texts have adopted the IPA, and as a result, it is far less confusing for many people around the world than any alternative. It may be confusing in some aspects to some English speakers, but that is precisely because it is conceived with an international point of view. The sound of y in "yes" is spelled /j/ in the IPA, and this was chosen from German and several other languages which spell this sound j.

For English words, Wikipedia does use a "normal" pronunciation key. It is Help:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be used in addition to the IPA, enclosed in the {{respell}} template. See the opening sentences of Beijing, Cochineal, and Lepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example, cum laude would be respelled kuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread as koom-LOH-day. English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it.

Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion.

The IPA should be specific to a particular national standard, and the national pronunciations should be listed separately.

Listing multiple national pronunciations after every Wikipedia entry word quickly becomes unwieldy, and listing only one leads to accusations of bias. Therefore, we use a system that aims at being pan-dialectal. Of course, if a particular dialect or local pronunciation is relevant to the topic, it may be listed in addition to the wider pronunciation, using {{IPA|und|...}} or {{IPA|en|...|generic=yes}}.

The use of /r/ for the rhotic consonant is inaccurate. It should be /ɹ/ instead.

The English rhotic is pronounced in a wide variety of ways in accents of English around the world, and the goal of our diaphonemic system is to cover as many of them as possible. Moreover, where there is no phonological contrast to possibly cause confusion, using a more typographically recognizable letter for a sound represented by another symbol in the narrow IPA is totally within the confines of the IPA's principles (IPA Handbook, pp. 27–28). In fact, /r/ is arguably the more traditional IPA notation; not only is it used by most if not all dictionaries, but also in Le Maître Phonétique, the predecessor to the Journal of the IPA, which was written entirely in phonetic transcription, ⟨r⟩ was the norm for the English rhotic.

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This page was nominated for deletion on 1 March 2008. The result of the discussion was Keep.

We should use different IPA symbol for english: English after RP

Hello,

I would like to bring the issue about the current use of the IPA symbol for english. It've been demonstrated by Linguist like Geoff Lindsey (from University College London) that the current IPA symbols choosen to represent english phonems are wrong in many ways. Like for exemble the phoneme /iː/ which is not at all pronunced like a long /i/ but like /ij/ in southern brittish english. Or another examble is the vowel in "boat" depicted by the symbol /eʊ/ unlike the real used pronunciation which is /ow/

The book "English after RP" explains all of that in great details, and for a free alternative, I don't know I it's allowed to post youtube link so I don't do it but I invite anyone interested to chek the youtube channel of Geoff Lindsey, there's videos about this exact topic.

Furthermore there is the CUBE dictionnary (CUBE = current brittish english) that act as a good source using a modern proper set of IPA symbols to better discribe the way english is pronounced. Malekpe (talk) 23:10, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

English is not restricted to RP. — kwami (talk) 19:00, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I assume that Malekpe meant the explanations of the RP correspondences of the diaphonemic signs on this page, not the actual diaphonemic system that Wikipedia uses - so what he was talking about is, indeed, restricted to RP. If he did mean the diaphonemic system, his remark was misguided not because 'English is not restricted to RP' but because that system isn't really an attempt to reflect adequately the phonetic realisation of any dialect. That said, this confusion only goes to show that the current diaphonemic system is misleading, since it looks like a phonetic transcription of an existing dialect, but is actually a set of abstract symbols that are meant to reflect all dialects simultaneously, regardless of the actual realisation. Wikipedia should adopt enPR like Wiktionary, because it does not create the misleading impression of an attempt at phonetic accuracy for those of us who do understand IPA.--Anonymous44 (talk) 23:17, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If someone doesn't know what slashes indicate then they don't understand IPA. Nardog (talk) 23:55, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

enPR is an american convention that's not readily accepted by the rest of the world. that said, i wouldn't be opposed to using it alongside the IPA instead of the current respelling system, which doesn't work for all words.

double slashes for the IPA have also been proposed, and would be more accurate, but it's been objected that anyone who needs that cue isn't likely to understand IPA anyway. i don't know how true that would turn out to be. — kwami (talk) 03:10, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

/r/

The "r" sound in English is not /r/ (voiced alveolar trill), but rather /ɹ̠/, the voiced postalveolar approximant, or often for convenience generalised as /ɹ/, the voiced alveolar approximant. The voiced alveolar trill was used in older dialects of English, like high RP, but is now very far from the norm, only really appearing in Scottish dialects, and seems misplaced to list it here? I get this is explained in the footnote but it feels misinformative to generalise quite different consonants purely for the sake of convenience, as that seems to contradict the purpose of the IPA? Natejb2003 (talk) 12:26, 29 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Phonemic analysis isn't purely for the sake of convenience, and it doesn't contradict the purpose of the IPA. In fact it is the primary purpose of the IPA, which is clear if you read the Handbook of the IPA, pp. 27ff. Nardog (talk) 14:43, 29 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The linked text does not claim what you say - it only says distinguishing between phonemes is one of the purposes of the IPA, not the primary one - and in any case using broad transcription and sticking to standard letters of the Latin alphabet at the expense of phonetic accuracy is not 'phonemic analysis'. The real reason why using /r/ is acceptable is because the whole system used by Wikipedia is diaphonemic and abstract, i.e. it is not really meant to express the specific phonetic realisation of any given dialect of English, but to signal them all simultaneously. Which only goes to show, just like the previous thread, that the use of IPA for a diaphonemic transcription leads to misunderstandings. The proposals for changes are due to people not understanding that the system is diaphonemic, and the people objecting to the proposals obviously keep forgetting that fact just as the OPs do. Therefore, as I wrote above, Wikipedia should use enPR, as Wiktionary does, or something similar - a system that does not mislead readers by looking like a phonetic transcription.--Anonymous44 (talk) 23:37, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It says From its earliest days (see appendix 4) the International Phonetic Association has aimed to provide 'a separate sign for each distinctive sound; that is, for each sound which, being used instead of another, in the same language, can change the meaning of a word'. This notion of a 'distinctive sound' is what became widely known in the twentieth century as the phoneme; /tru/ might be suitable for the English word true or the French word trou; and The term 'broad' sometimes carries the extra implication that, as far as possible, unmodified letters of the roman alphabet have been used. Nardog (talk) 23:58, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

decisions on which sounds qualify for their own letters depends on whether they're a phonemic distinction in languages, with exceptions like dentals. but it's still a phonetic alphabet; the phonemic criterion just means that few diacritics are needed for broad transcription, making for a cleaner appearance in many situations. — kwami (talk) 03:16, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FORCE and NORTH

FORCE = /foːɻs/ while NORTH = /nɔːɻθ/. ~2025-31155-13 (talk) 11:46, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This page is using the basic ⟨r⟩ grapheme to represent the cross-dialectal phoneme, not the symbol that reflects its realization in specific dialects. Also, check out the page's first paragraph. Largoplazo (talk) 18:21, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]