Pronunciation Respelling For English - International Phonetic Alphabet

International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a standardized method of phonetic transcription developed by a group of English and French language teachers in 1888. In the beginning, only specialized pronunciation dictionaries for linguists used it, for example, the English Pronouncing Dictionary edited by Daniel Jones (EPD, 1917). The IPA was used by English teachers as well, and started to appear in popular dictionaries for learners of English as a foreign language, such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (1948), and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978).

IPA is very flexible, allowing for a wide variety of transcriptions between broad phonemic transcriptions which describe the significant units of meaning in language, and phonetic transcriptions which may indicate every nuance of sound in detail.

The IPA transcription conventions used in the first twelve editions of the EPD was relatively simple, using a quantitative system indicating vowel length using a colon, and requiring the reader to infer other vowel qualities. Many phoneticians preferred a qualitative system, which used different symbols to indicate vowel timbre and colour. A.C. Gimson introduced a quantitative-qualitative IPA notation system when he took over editorship of the EPD (13th edition, 1967), and by the 1990s, the Gimson system had become a de facto standard for phonetic notation of British Received Pronunciation (RP).

The first native (not learner's) English dictionary using IPA may have been the Collins English Dictionary (1979), and others followed suit. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (OED2, 1989) used IPA, transcribed letter-for-letter from entries in the first edition, which had been noted in a scheme by the original editor, James Murray.

While IPA has not been adopted by popular dictionaries in the United States, there is a demand for learner's dictionaries which provide both British and American English pronunciation. Some dictionaries, such as the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English provide a separate transcription for each.

British and American English dialects have a similar set of phonemes, but some are pronounced differently; in technical parlance, they consist of different phones. Although developed for RP, the Gimson system being phonemic, it is not far from much of General American pronunciation as well. A number of recent dictionaries, such as the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary, add a few non-phonemic symbols /ʳ i u ᵊl ᵊn/ to represent both RP and General American pronunciation in a single IPA transcription.

Clive Upton updated the Gimson scheme, changing the symbols used for five vowels. He served as pronunciation consultant for the influential Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which adopted this scheme in its ninth edition (1995). Upton's reform is controversial: it reflects changing pronunciation, but critics say it represents a narrower regional accent, and abandons parallelism with American and Australian English. In addition, the UCL linguist John C Wells said that he could not understand why Upton had altered the presentation of "price" to prʌɪs.

Upton outlined his reasons for the transcription in a chapter of A Handbook of Varieties of English. He said that the PRICE vowel represented how the starting point could be anything from centralised front to centralised back. The change in the NURSE vowel was intended as a simplification as well as a reflection that nɜːs was not the only possible realisation in RP. The other alterations were intended to reflect changes that have occurred over time.

The in-progress 3rd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary uses Upton's scheme for representing British pronunciations. For American pronunciations it uses an IPA-based scheme devised by Prof. William Kretzschmar of the University of Georgia.