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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 pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography (i.e. the spelling does not reliably indicate pronunciation). There are two basic types of pronunciation respelling:
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 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. For example, you may pronounce cot and caught the same , do and dew , or marry and merry .
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.
Respelling non-English pronunciations into English is inadequate and misleading. If an English respelling is given for a Welsh or Māori name, not only would it be bad Welsh or Māori but the implication would be that it's the English pronunciation. Nonetheless, an ad hoc description of a non-English language word in that language is permitted.
The original IPA alphabet was based on the Romic alphabet, an English spelling reform created by Henry Sweet that in turn was based on the Palaeotype alphabet of Alexander John Ellis, but to make it usable for other languages the values of the symbols were allowed to vary from language to language. [note 2] For example, the sound (the sh in ...
The closest sound found in English, as well as many other languages, is the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ] (Swedish words with the sound often correspond to English words with "sh", such as "shield", "shoot"), although usually the closest audible approximation is the voiceless labialized velar approximant [ʍ] found in some English dialects.