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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-all}} or {{IPA-endia}}.

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.

Double entry[edit]

Why is ɪ appearing twice, both under "Vowels" and "Weak vowels"? If we need two entries here, I would expect separate symbols (even if one is a modification of the other with a combining mark of some kind). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:05, 29 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the double entries for //ɪ// and //oʊ// are mainly there for historic reasons, back from the day when we were propagating our own idiosyncratic symbols for the weak vowel versions of the two. I have tentatively unified the symbols, keeping all the content. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 06:11, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Colons for length symbols[edit]

In the 3rd bullet point of the Dialect variation section colons are used in place of length symbols:

Most speakers of North American English (with the exception of Eastern New England) do not distinguish between the vowels in father /'fɑ:ðər/ and bother /'bɒðər/, pronouncing the two words as rhymes. If you speak such a dialect, ignore the difference between the symbols /ɑ:/ and /ɒ/.

I think they need to be replaced. 2001:BB6:B84C:CF00:B1A9:DA55:640A:FC65 (talk) 20:13, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Nardog (talk) 22:39, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Inclusion of /ts/ as a marginal phoneme and removal of /ʔ/[edit]

/ʔ/ is an entirely paralinguistic sound and "uh-oh" is not a valid word to base the inclusion of a marginal phoneme around. However, seeing and /ts/ is a common marginal phoneme in words like "tsar" or "Mozart", including it would probably be valid. Plexus96 (talk) 14:36, 17 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

/ʔ/ is included for Hawaiian loans. It's illustrated by uh-oh simply because it's one of the most common and intuitive ways to illustrate the sound; it doesn't mean it's only used in paralanguage.

/t/ and /s/ are already phonemes so there's no need to list /ts/ separately. Nardog (talk) 00:42, 18 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

/t/ and /ʃ/ are already phonemes so there’s no need for /tʃ/ as well…? БудетЛучше (talk) 18:15, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Because it's a phoneme in English if you ask just about any linguist. See English phonology#Obstruents for why. Nardog (talk) 18:17, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

/ts/ behaves more like a consonant cluster, rather than a phoneme. It doesn't appear word-initially, at least not regularly (see e.g. [1]), only word-internally and -finally. Compare this with German /ts/ which can easily appear in this position, as in zu /tsuː/ or ziemlich /ˈtsiːmlɪç/. Native speakers of English constantly mispronounce those as /syː ~ suː/ and /ˈsiːmlɪk, -x, -ʃ/. Sol505000 (talk) 15:39, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"/ʔ/ is an entirely paralinguistic sound"

It's also a common allophone across most dialects of English, particularly for /t/ 167.206.19.130 (talk) 19:56, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's neither here nor there. We transcribe any allophone of /t/ as /t/ because this key is diaphonemic. Nardog (talk) 20:41, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

IPA overwhelming[edit]

IPA is overwhelming, redundant, and not user friendly. If you use the basic latin sounds the phonics are all there and we all know them. No need to learn a whole new set of sounds that are extremely numerous and cumbersome. 136.143.149.206 (talk) 17:51, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We don't "all know them", though. Your west coast US pronunciation will be different from mine. WP:RESPELL describes how simple pronunciation guides don't always work. For instance, I pronounce ""Mary", "marry", and "merry" differently, but know that some Americans don't. The same applies to "cot" and "caught". Some of my compatriots pronounce "aren't" and "aunt" differently, but I don't. Bazza 7 (talk) 18:55, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Text on secondary stress[edit]

On the help page, we show both primary and secondary stress marks, yet we never define how we do (or don't) use those symbols in the diaphonemic system. I believe the last chat we had arriving at some consensus was here, where we agreed on WP to assign secondary stress only to a strong vowel preceding primary stress but not to a strong vowel succeeding it (i.e., following the British rather than American convention). It seems like it would be helpful to explain this, and even the concept of how secondary stress operates in English at all, if anyone can think of a concise wording for the concept. Wolfdog (talk) 12:53, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Decided to BE BOLD. Wolfdog (talk) 13:54, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Anki[edit]

We currently show the pronounciation of Anki as /ˈɒŋkiː/, which seems surprising to me. I am aware that /ɒ/ for the spelling ⟨an⟩ is not unheard of, especially in French loanwords with /ɑ̃/ in the original, but is Anki really pronounced like that? 187.245.68.84 (talk) 00:15, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I expect /æ/ or /ɑː/ (especially from British and American speakers, respectively), but it's unsourced anyway. It should be sourced to an ad or a developer saying it. Nardog (talk) 06:01, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

/ˈɑːŋki/ is all I've ever heard in US English, so that's what was meant, most likely. I've corrected the IPA, changing /iː/ to /i/ because the nasal is always velar (so the vowel is weak, phonemically /ɪ/ according to Cruttenden, or /ɨ/ according to some others). Sol505000 (talk) 15:47, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Youglish indicates that /ˈæŋki/ is the norm in BrE, which fits for the general pattern of nativisation of <a> in recent loanwords in BrE vs. AmE. Offa29 (talk) 15:59, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]