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International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) 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 o ...
can be used to represent sound correspondences among various accents and dialects of the
English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to t ...
. These charts give a
diaphoneme A diaphoneme is an abstract phonological unit that identifies a correspondence between related sounds of two or more varieties of a language or language cluster. For example, some English varieties contrast the vowel of ''late'' () with that of ...
for each sound, followed by its realization in different dialects. The symbols for the diaphonemes are given in bold, followed by their most common phonetic values.


Abbreviations list

The following abbreviations are used in this article for regional varieties of English: See
Pronunciation respelling for English A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which does not have a phonemic orthography (i.e. the spelling does not reliably indicate pronunciation). There are tw ...
for phonetic transcriptions used in different dictionaries.


Consonants


Vowels

In the
vowels A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...
chart, a separate phonetic value is given for each major dialect, alongside the words used to name their corresponding
lexical set A lexical set is a group of words that all fall under a single category based on a single shared phonological feature. A phoneme is a basic unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another. Most commonly, following the work ...
s. The diaphonemes for the lexical sets given here are based on RP and General American; they are not sufficient to express all of the distinctions found in other dialects, such as Australian English.


See also

*
English phonology Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system. Amo ...
*
List of dialects of the English language Dialects are linguistic varieties that may differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling and grammar. For the classification of varieties of English only in terms of pronunciation, see regional accents of English. Overview Dialects can be ...
*
Phonetic alphabets Phonetic alphabet can mean: * Phonetic transcription system: a system for transcribing the precise sounds of human speech into writing ** International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): the most widespread such system ** (See :Phonetic alphabets for othe ...
*
Pronunciation respelling for English A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which does not have a phonemic orthography (i.e. the spelling does not reliably indicate pronunciation). There are tw ...
*
SAMPA chart for English , no , , or , , - ! !! !! , now , , , , - ! !! !! , near, here , , , , - ! !! !! , hair, there , , , , - ! !! !! , tour , , , , - ! !! !! , pupil , , , {, class="wikitable" ! co ...
* Help:IPA/English * Help:IPA/Conventions for English


References


Further reading

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * {{IPA navigation Chart for English dialects English phonology Comparison of forms of English