Wiktionary:International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. It is intended as a notational standard for the phonemic and phonetic representation of all spoken languages.

This page gives a general overview of the symbols used in the IPA. As it is used for all languages, it would be impractical to explain to English speakers how to pronounce all of the sounds. Therefore, the symbols are grouped based on the features they have, or the parts of the mouth used to pronounce them. A dental consonant, for example, is pronounced using the teeth, while a bilabial consonant uses both lips.

Pages explaining the pronunciation of individual languages can be found in Category:Pronunciation by language. General guidance for the presentation of pronunciations on Wiktionary is at Pronunciation.

Brackets
There are two types of brackets.

[ ... ] is for real pronunciations.

/ ... / is for allophones in a certain language.

For example, the pronunciations of "pin" and "spin" can be written as /ˈpɪn/ and /ˈspɪn/ since their "p"s are recognised as a same sound for English speakers. But their real sounds are different like [pʰɪn] and [spɪn].

So we use / ... / for simple when we talk about only one language. But we usually need [ ... ] to describe the real sounds.

Consonants (pulmonic)

 * Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant.
 * Shaded areas denote articulations judged impossible.

Vowels

 * Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel.

Co-articulated consonants

 * Affricates and double articulations can be represented by two symbols joined by a tie bar if necessary: k͡p  t͡s

Tones and word accents
Tone letters may come before or after a word or syllable. In the IPA Handbook, they come before to indicate prosodic pitch in Portuguese, and after to indicate lexical tone in Cantonese.

They may also face left or right. The distinction is used for tone sandhi.

Upstep and downstep always come before the syllable.

Diacritics
Diacritics may be placed above a symbol with a descender, e.g. &#331;&#778;.