The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the 1993 version of

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...

(IPA). The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

. SAMPA was devised as a

hack Hack may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Games * ''Hack'' (Unix video game), a 1984 roguelike video game * ''.hack'' (video game series), a series of video games by the multimedia franchise ''.hack'' Music * ''Hack'' (album), a 199 ...

to work around the inability of text encodings to represent IPA symbols. Later, as

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

support for IPA symbols became more widespread, the necessity for a separate, computer-readable system for representing the IPA in ASCII decreased. However, X-SAMPA is still useful as the basis for an input method for true IPA.

Summary

Notes

* The IPA symbols that are ordinary lower case letters have the same value in X-SAMPA as they do in the IPA. * X-SAMPA uses backslashes as modifying suffixes to create new symbols. For example, O is a distinct sound from O\, to which it bears no relation. Such use of the backslash character can be a problem, since many programs interpret it as an

escape character In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character (computing), character that invokes an alternative interpretation on the following characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharac ...

for the character following it. For example, such X-SAMPA symbols do not work in EMU, so backslashes must be replaced with some other symbol (e.g., an

asterisk The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often voc ...

: '*') when adding phonemic transcription to an EMU speech database. The backslash has no fixed meaning. * X-SAMPA diacritics follow the symbols they modify. Except for ~ for

nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internation ...

, = for syllabicity, and ` for retroflexion and rhotacization, diacritics are joined to the character with the underscore character _. * The underscore character is also used to encode the IPA tiebar: k_p codes for /k͡p/. * The numbers _1 to _6 are reserved diacritics as shorthand for language-specific tone numbers. * The

IETF language tag An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the s ...

s registry has assigned as the subtag for text transcribed in X-SAMPA.

Lower-case symbols

Charts

Consonants

* Asterisks (*) mark sounds that do not have X-SAMPA symbols. Daggers (†) mark IPA symbols that have recently been added to

. Since April 2008, the latter is the case of the labiodental flap, symbolized by a right-hook ''v'' in the IPA: Labiodental flap (Gentium)

. A dedicated symbol for the labiodental flap does not yet exist in X-SAMPA.

Vowels

References

External links

Computer-coding the IPA: A proposed extension of SAMPA

X-SAMPA to IPA to CXS converter

Web-based translator for X-SAMPA documents.
Produces Unicode text, XML text, PostScript, PDF, or LaTeX TIPA.
Z-SAMPA
a backward-compatible extension of X-SAMPA sometimes used for conlangs {{Latin script SAMPA 1995 in computing Writing systems introduced in the 1990s University College London