The International Phonetic Alphabet

So far, the examples given have been rather general ones, or have involved analogies from outside language. Giving more detailed examples demands a more specific vocabulary, and a notation system dedicated to the description of sounds. The English spelling system, although it is the system of transcription we are most used to, is both too restrictive and too lenient to do the job.

Without a universal transcription system for phonetics and phonology, writing down the unfamiliar sounds of other languages presents an almost insuperable challenge. Take, for example, a sound which is used only para-linguistically in English (that is, for some purpose outside the language system itself), but which is a perfectly ordinary consonant in other languages, just as [b] in but or [l] in list are in English, namely the ‘tut-tut’ sound made to signal disapproval. When we see this, we do not think of a whole word, but of a repeated clicking.

This description is hopelessly inadequate, however, for anyone else trying to recognize the sound in question, or learn how to make it. Hearing a native speaker use the ‘tut-tut’ click in a language where it is an ordinary consonant does not help us understand how the sound is made or how it compares with others. Likewise, adopting the usual spelling from that language (assuming it is not one of the many without an orthography) might let us write the ‘tut-tut’ sound down; but this technique would not produce a universal system for writing sounds of the world’s languages, since linguists would tend to use their own spelling systems as far as possible, and opt for representations from the languages they happened to know for other sounds. There would be little consistency, and generalization of such a system would be difficult.

The situation is worse with ‘exotic’ sounds which do not happen to coincide even with those used para-linguistically in English: groping towards a description in ordinary English is far too vague to allow accurate reproduction of the sound in question; and indeed, such sounds tended by early commentators to be regarded as unstable or not quite proper. John Leighton Wilson, who published a brief description of the African language Grebo in 1838, had considerable difficulties with sounds which do not have an obvious English spelling, and tended to resolve this by simply not transcribing them at all. Thus, he notes that ‘There is a consonant sound intermediate between b and p, which is omitted … with the expectation that it will, in the course of time, gradually conform to one or the other of the two sounds to which it seems allied’. Similarly, he observes ‘a few words in the language so completely nasal that they cannot be properly spelled by any combination of letters whatever’.

It is for these reasons that the International Phonetic Alphabet was proposed in 1888; it has been under constant review ever since by the International Phonetic Association, and the latest revision dates from 1996. It is true that a certain amount of learning is required to become familiar with the conventions of the IPA and the characteristics of sounds underlying the notation: but once you know that ‘tut-tut’ is[I],, an alveolar click, it will always be possible to produce the relevant sound accurately; to write it down unambiguously; and to recognize it in other languages.

Although a universal system of description and transcription might be desirable in principle, and even in practice when dealing with unfamiliar languages and sounds, readers of a book both in and on English might question the necessity of learning the IPA. However, precisely the same types of problems encountered above also appear in connection with the phonology of English, and some new ones besides.

First, there is considerable ambiguity in the English spelling system, and it works in both directions: many sounds to one spelling, and many spellings to one sound. The former situation results in ‘eye-rhymes’, or forms which look as if they ought to have the same pronunciation, but don’t. There are various doggerel poems about this sort of ambiguity (often written by non-native speakers who have struggled with the system): one begins by pointing out a set of eye-rhymes – ‘I gather you already know, Of plough and cough and through and dough’. Those four words, which we might expect to rhyme on the basis of the spelling, in fact end in four quite different vowels, and cough has a final consonant too. On the other hand, see, sea, people, amoeba and fiend have the same long [i:]vowel, but five different spellings.

Despite these multiple ambiguities, attempts are regularly made to indicate pronunciations using the spelling system. None are wholly successful, for a variety of different reasons. The lack of precision involved can be particularly frustrating for phonologists trying to discover characteristics of earlier stages of English. John Hart, a well-known sixteenth-century grammarian, gives many descriptions of the pronunciations of his time, but the lack of a standard transcription system hampers him when it comes to one of the major mysteries of English phonology at this period, namely the sound of the vowel spelled a. Hart mentions this explicitly, and tells us that it is made ‘with wyde opening of the mouthe, as when a man yawneth’: but does that mean a back vowel, the sort now found for Southern British English speakers in father, or a front one, like the father vowel for New Zealanders or Australians? Similarly, Thomas Low Nichols, discussing mid-nineteenth-century American English, notes that ‘It is certain that men open their mouths and broaden their speech as they go West, until on the Mississippi they will tell you “thar are heaps of bar [bear] over thar, whar I was raised”’. Here we have two related difficulties: the nature of the a vowel, and what the orthographic r means, if anything. Most British English speakers (those from Scotland, Northern Ireland and some areas of the West

Country excepted) will pronounce [r] only immediately before a vowel: so a London English speaker would naturally read the quote with [r] at the end of the first thar, bar and whar, but not the second thar, where the next word begins with a consonant. However, a Scot would produce [r] in all these words, regardless of the following sound. Which is closer to what Thomas Low Nichols intended? Orthographic r is still problematic today: when Michael Bateman, in a newspaper cookery column, writes that ‘This cook, too, couldn’t pronounce the word. It’s not pah-eller; it’s pie ey-yar’, he is producing a helpful guide for most English English speakers, who will understand that his ‘transcription’ of paella indicates a final vowel, since they would not pronounce [r] in this context in English; but he is quite likely to confuse Scots or Americans, who would pronounce [r] wherever r appears in English spelling, and may therefore get the mistaken idea that paella has a final [r] in Spanish. In short, the fact that there are many different Englishes, and that each quite properly has its own phonological interpretations of the same spelling system (which, remember, is multiply ambiguous in the first place), means we encounter inevitable difficulties in trying to use spelling to give explicit information about sounds.

The same problems arise in a slightly different context when writers try to adapt the spelling system to indicate accent differences:

‘Good flight?’ asked Jessica at Christchurch Airport. I melodramatically bowed a depressurization-deaf ear towards her … before answering that it had been a little gruelling.

‘You are a bit pale. But you’ll still be able to get breakfast at the hotel … ’

What Jessica actually said was git brikfist it the hitil. The Kiwi accent is a vowel-vice voice, in which the e is squeezed to an i, the a elongated to an ee. A New Zealander, for example, writes with a pin, and signals agreement with the word yis.

(Mark Lawson, The Battle for Room Service: Journeys to all the safe places, Picador (1994), 22)

Lawson succeeds in showing that a difference exists between New Zealand and English English, and provides a very rough approximation of that difference. However, anyone who has listened to New Zealand speakers will know that their pronunciation of pen is not identical to Southern British English pin, as Lawson’s notation would suggest; and readers who have not encountered the variety might arrive at a number of different interpretations of his comments that New Zealand vowels are ‘squeezed’ or ‘elongated’. The National Centre for English Cultural Tradition in Sheffield has produced a list of local phrases, again rendered in a modified version of English spelling: it includes intitot (‘Isn’t it hot?’), eez gooinooam (‘he’s going home’), and lerrus gerrus andzwesht (‘Let’s get our hands washed’). Sometimes the modifications are obvious; the lack of h in intitot suggests that no [h] is pronounced, and the substitution of r for t in lerrus gerrus signals the common northern English weakening of [t] to [r] between vowels. But why double rr? The double vowel letters in gooinooam presumably signal long vowels; but the rr in lerrus certainly does not mean a long consonant. Such lists are amusing when the reader knows the variety in question; but reading the list in a respectable imitation of an unfamiliar accent would be rather a hit and miss affair.

The same goes for dialect literature, even when there is an informally agreed set of emendations to the spelling system, as is perhaps the case for Scottish English. Tom Leonard’s poem ‘Unrelated Incidents (3)’ begins:

Again, many of the alterations are entirely transparent for a reader who is familiar with Scottish English – aboot does sound like a-boot rather than having the diphthong usually found in Southern British English about, and widny rather than wouldn’t is both clear and accurate. However, not everything is so obvious .Trooth is written to match aboot, and the two words do have the same vowel in Scots – but the former is pronounced like its English English equivalent, whereas the latter is not; so we might ask, why alter both? Thi is consistently written for the, and there is indeed a slight difference in those final vowels between the two varieties; but if we compare Tom Leonard with Mark Lawson, the impression given is that thi (= the) for a Scot sounds like pin (= pen) for a New Zealander, which is not the case at all.

In some cases of this type, there are attempts to introduce new symbols into the English spelling system to represent accent differences: one particularly common device is to use an apostrophe. This has become a fairly conventional and familiar device; but again, it turns out to be ambiguous. For instance, take the three phrases I feel ’ot, She was waitin’, and Give us the bu’er. The first is perhaps the most straightforward: many speakers of non-standard varieties of English consistently drop their [h]s (and we all do, in pronouns under low stress, for instance, as in What did he say?, where [h] will be pronounced only in extraordinarily careful speech).

In this case, then, the apostrophe means the standard [h] is omitted. This might, however, lead us to believe that an apostrophe always means something is missing, relative to the standard pronunciation. Informal characterizations might support this hypothesis, since speakers producing forms like waitin’ and bu’er are frequently described as ‘dropping their gs’ and ‘dropping their ts’ (or ‘swallowing their ts’) respectively: an article in The Independent of 28 June 2000 reports that ‘… the entire cast of East Enders … swallow their ts, ps and ks like true Glasgow speakers when using such words as “sta’ement” and “sea’belt”’.

However, the phonetic facts suggest otherwise. Whereas ’ot simply lacks an initial consonant, waitin’ does not lack a final one: instead, the final [ŋ] of waiting has been replaced by [n] (recall the discussion of incoherent versus intemperate above). For most speakers, apart from some from the Midlands and north of England, there was no [g] to drop in the first place, simply one nasal in more formal circumstances, which shifts to another nasal in informal conversation. In bu’er, we also find one consonant, this time [t], being replaced by another, the glottal stop; but this time, the replacement is only found in English as an alternative for another sound. It has no independent orthographic representation, and is strongly associated with informal, non-standard and stigmatized usage.

If we are to consider these variants objectively, however, we need a system of notation which will allow us to observe them neutrally, providing transcriptions of each variety in its own terms: seeing the glottal stop as IPA [ʔ], which is a perfectly normal consonant in, say, Arabic, rather than regarding it as an unsymbolisable grunt, or a debased form of another consonant, may allow us to analyze the facts of accent variation without seeing every departure from an idealized standard variety as requiring apology.

The linguistic arbitrariness but social grounding of such judgements is apparent from forms like car park – a standard Southern British English pronunciation will have no [r] in either word, and to a Scottish English speaker with both [r]s invariably produced, there is certainly something missing; but I have not seen this represented as ca’ pa’k, or heard southerners accused of ‘swallowing their [r]s’.

For all these cases, what we need is a consistent, agreed system of transcription, so that we can assess the accent differences we find and compare them with confidence. Of course, no purely phonetic system is going to help with the meaning of items of vocabulary a reader has not met before – an IPA transcription will not tell you what a bampot is, or glaur, or a beagie, if you don’t know. But at least you have the comfort of knowing how the natives pronounce it.

At the same time, this is an introductory text on English, and not a handbook of general phonetics, so only those sections of the IPA relevant to English sounds will be considered, beginning with consonants, and moving on to vowels, where most accent variation in English is concentrated. However, before introducing the IPA in detail, we must also confront a phonological issue. As we have already seen, native speakers of a language cannot always be relied upon to hear every theoretically discernible gradation of sound. In some cases, the IPA supplies alternative symbols in cases where speakers will be quite sure they are hearing the same thing; and this is not a universal limitation of human ears, but rather varies from language to language. To illustrate this, and to resolve the problem that sometimes speakers think they are hearing something quite different from what they objectively are hearing, we must introduce the concept of the phoneme.