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The following is the chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a standardized system of phonetic symbols devised and maintained by the International Phonetic Association.
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. 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.
This chart provides audio examples for phonetic vowel symbols. The symbols shown include those in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and added material. The chart is based on the official IPA vowel chart. [1] The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet.
For a table listing all spellings of the sounds on this page, see English orthography § Sound-to-spelling correspondences. For help converting spelling to pronunciation, see English orthography § Spelling-to-sound correspondences. The words given as examples for two different symbols may sound the same to you.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can be used to represent sound correspondences among various accents and dialects of the English language. These charts give a diaphoneme 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.
A simplified procedure for determining whether two sounds represent the same or different phonemes. A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, scat, skit.
On the other hand, the IPA (being designed to represent sounds from any language in the world) is not as intuitive for those chiefly familiar with English orthography, for whom this respelling system is likely to be easier for English words and names. So, while the IPA is the required form of representing pronunciation, respelling remains optional.
The city of Pittsburgh shows an especially advanced subset of Western Pennsylvania English, additionally characterized by a sound change that is unique in North America: the monophthongization of /aʊ/ to [a]. This is the source of the stereotypical Pittsburgh pronunciation of downtown as "dahntahn".