What is IPA?

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It is a universal phonetic method for representing speech sounds. Linguists and speech-language pathologists can correctly describe language sounds for analysis and communication using the IPA. Linguistics, speech-language pathology, and language instruction use IPA.

Example

Here’s an example of how the IPA can be used to transcribe the sounds of speech in English:

The word “cat” can be transcribed in IPA as /kaet/.

Each symbol inside the slashes represents a word sound. Linguists may accurately describe and compare language sounds using the IPA, which clearly defines speech sound representation.