INTERACTIVE IPA.

January 5, 2005 by languagehat 2 Comments

Paul Meier Dialect Services has a webpage with interactive charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) designed by Eric Armstrong of York University, Toronto, and voiced by Paul Meier, of the University of Kansas.

If you… want to hear one of the “signature sounds” in isolation, or in comparison with other sounds, you may do so using the charts here. Vowels, consonants, ingressives, suprasegmentals, intonation, diacritics, ejectives, implosives, diphthongs, and clicks are demonstrated. Clicking one of the charts below will link you to a Flash animation… Some of the files are quite large and may take some time to load with a dial-up connection, while others are smaller and will load more quickly.
The latest version of the IPA Alphabet was published in 1993 (updated in 1996) by the International Phonetic Association.
In addition to the official IPA charts, we have also provided a chart demonstrating the diphthongs and triphthongs of Received Pronunciation (Standard British English,) and General American (GenAm.)

Kudos for this wonderful link go to CellarFloor‘s MonkeyFilter post.
Update. See related MetaFilter post.

Comments

Eliza says

January 6, 2005 at 9:27 am

Excellent site which illustrates brilliantly the difference in US/UK pronunciation. But I have one question (don’t shout at me: I’m only little and I’m not a professional linguist) – what do the little hooks on the symbols represent?
language hat says

January 6, 2005 at 10:43 am

Different things — they’re basically just a way of differentiating symbols.

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