Help talk:IPA/English
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The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use a normal pronunciation key?
The IPA is the international standard for phonetic transcription, and therefore the Wikipedia standard as well. Many non-American and/or EFL-oriented dictionaries and pedagogical texts have adopted the IPA, and as a result, it is far less confusing for many people around the world than any alternative. It may be confusing in some aspects to some English speakers, but that is precisely because it is conceived with an international point of view. The sound of y in "yes" is spelled /j/ in the IPA, and this was chosen from German and several other languages which spell this sound j.
For English words, Wikipedia does use a "normal" pronunciation key. It is Help:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be used in addition to the IPA, enclosed in the {{respell}} template. See the opening sentences of Beijing, Cochineal, and Lepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example, cum laude would be respelled kuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread as koom-LOH-day. English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it. Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion. The IPA should be specific to a particular national standard, and the national pronunciations should be listed separately.
Listing multiple national pronunciations after every Wikipedia entry word quickly becomes unwieldy, and listing only one leads to accusations of bias. Therefore, we use a system that aims at being pan-dialectal. Of course, if a particular dialect or local pronunciation is relevant to the topic, it may be listed in addition to the wider pronunciation, using {{IPA|und|...}} or {{IPA|en|...|generic=yes}}. The use of /r/ for the rhotic consonant is inaccurate. It should be /ɹ/ instead.
The English rhotic is pronounced in a wide variety of ways in accents of English around the world, and the goal of our diaphonemic system is to cover as many of them as possible. Moreover, where there is no phonological contrast to possibly cause confusion, using a more typographically recognizable letter for a sound represented by another symbol in the narrow IPA is totally within the confines of the IPA's principles (IPA Handbook, pp. 27–28). In fact, /r/ is arguably the more traditional IPA notation; not only is it used by most if not all dictionaries, but also in Le Maître Phonétique, the predecessor to the Journal of the IPA, which was written entirely in phonetic transcription, ⟨r⟩ was the norm for the English rhotic. |
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Strut - comma
The strut - comma merger also happens in Rochesterian dialects as well ~2025-44015-48 (talk) 15:34, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
- Yes, millions of speakers from the US, England and Wales have that merger. In fact, it is possible that the STRUT/COMMA contrast is rarer than the merger. What's almost universal is the FOOT-STRUT split, but it is often mischaracterized as a creation of a new phoneme /ʌ/, which is highly dialect-specific. Sol505000 (talk) 19:31, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
Ampersand and Cat merger
So the way I pronounce it, Ampersand and Cat's "æ"s are not the same. To me, the æ in "ampersand" sounds more like an "iæ", "ɪæ", or "ɛæ" sound to me. Try saying "ampersand" and "cat" right now. Can you hear a difference? Could you perhaps add this to the mergers or make a seperate symbol for it? ~2025-43927-71 (talk) 17:47, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
- It's an environmentally conditioned allophony. For most Americans (and all Canadians AFAIK), the [ɛə ~ eə] allophone appears only before nasals, and before /r/. And this guide doesn't cover dialects in which /eə/ (the one from Middle English /a/, not the one from Middle English /aːr/, which we transcribe with ⟨ɛər⟩) is a separate phoneme. Sol505000 (talk) 18:57, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
- So is it like a nasalized æ, like æ̃? ~2025-43854-80 (talk) 21:13, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
- That's also a possible pronunciation (all realizations are nasalized, so [ɛ̃ə̃ ~ ẽə̃]), but long: [æ̃ː], or with slight raising [ɛ̃ː]. Non-natives mispronounce this tensed /æ/ by keeping it short, merging "man" with "men". They're always distinguished by length, AFAIK. Sol505000 (talk) 21:16, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
- So is it like a nasalized æ, like æ̃? ~2025-43854-80 (talk) 21:13, 30 December 2025 (UTC)
Dew pronunciation is 'dyew' not just 'doo' and 'djoo'
'Dy' exists and is standard, not just 'doo' (American)' and 'djoo' (technically, bad diction). ~2026-31781-5 (talk) 13:58, 15 January 2026 (UTC)
- Nowhere do either "doo" or "djoo" appear on the page. In addition, in the IPA (which is what the page is about), "j" represents the initial sound of "you" and "yet", whereas "y" represents a vowel sound not present in most varieties of English, though you might be familiar with it if you know, for example, French ("fume") or German ("müde") or Dutch ("dus"). So the "/djuː/" that you see in the footnote does represent the pronunciation you were probably thinking of when you wrote "dy". Similarly, phonemically, "you" is represented as "/juː/" and "yet" as "/jɛt/". The letter "j" in English most commonly corresponds to the representation "/dʒ/", while "ʒ" itself corresponds to the "s" in "leisure" or "vision". Largoplazo (talk) 15:19, 15 January 2026 (UTC)
Enthuse is not a real word.
Enthuse is not a real word. Find a better example. ~2026-15950-75 (talk) 19:43, 17 March 2026 (UTC)
- If people use it, what makes it not a real word? Largoplazo (talk) 00:37, 18 March 2026 (UTC)
- "enthuse". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- "enthuse". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. OCLC 1032680871.
- wikt:enthuse
- Seems like a word to me. ~ oklopfer (💬) 01:02, 18 March 2026 (UTC)
⟨œ⟩ in American dictionaries and correspondence in English accents
It doesn't seem to be "merely a notational convention". In both MW and AHD, ⟨œ⟩ maps directly to either [ø] or [œ] (depending on the word, not the dictionary):
- https://www.ahdictionary.com/application/resources/misc/pronkey.pdf
- https://merriam-webster.com/assets/mw/static/pdf/help/guide-to-pronunciation.pdf
MW notes that it is often anglicized to NURSE (bird in their convention), but it is not some mysterious and unidentifiable vowel as this key makes it out to be. There seems to be a conflicting standard with "does not correspond to any vowel in any accent of English", as the French nasal vowels arguably do not either any more than this one does, they are all typically only found in loans; though on the contrary, /øː/ is well known to be the realization of NURSE in NZE, so the statement that it does not occur in any accent of English seems to just be provably untrue. ~ oklopfer (💬) 20:00, 23 March 2026 (UTC)