Phonetic transcription

Phonetic transcription, representation of discrete units of speech sound through symbols. Over the years, multiple writing systems and computer symbol sets have been developed for this purpose. The most common is perhaps the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Most modern languages have standard orthographies, or ways that they are represented in written or typed characters or symbols. However, these systems cannot account for all of the idiosyncrasies of spoken language or for shifts in pronunciation over time. For example, in Old and Middle English the word knight was pronounced with the initial /k/ sound. In modern English the k is silent in pronunciation but remains in the written word. In addition, many languages do not have distinct graphemes (written symbols) for each phoneme (distinct speech sound). Standard English orthography has single phonemes that are consistently represented by more than one symbol (if you say “sh” to yourself, you can hear that it is one sound; in phonetic alphabets this phoneme is represented by a single written character rather than two, but in most English words it is written “sh”). It also has single phonemes that can be represented by a variety of symbols (the ei in seize and ea in seas make the same sound but are written “ei” and “ea”—the same sound can also be represented in other ways, including “ee” and “e.”

English also has symbols or series of symbols that can be pronounced in a variety of ways: compare the sound a makes in cat and father, or the sound th makes in father and math. Single symbols in English also can represent multiple phonemes, such as the x in fox, which represents the phonemes /k/ and /s/ together. Other languages have similar issues to varying degrees depending on how their written language is structured. Indeed, some languages use the same or similar orthography as other languages to represent different sounds. For instance, the j in Spanish represents a sound unlike the English j used in words like judge or January. Consider how an English speaker encountering the word jalapeno for the first time would assume it is pronounced.

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There are also distinctions in pronunciation among regional accents or even among individuals that can be noted with phonetic transcription. Compare how speakers of American English and speakers of British English might pronounce the word tomato. Moreover, the pronunciation of words may be altered by their place or context in a phrase or sentence. For instance, a speaker may fully pronounce the individual words did, you, and eat in a certain way but combine them into a sentence as something that sounds more like “Djoo eat?”

Having a way to transcribe these differences is important in many fields, especially in the study and application of linguistics. Transcribing precise speech sounds is also helpful in documentation for the treatment of speech differences and disorders, or even for describing the sounds made in singing. It is useful for those learning new languages for communication, or for scholars studying languages that previously may not have been transcribed. Phonetic transcription is a common feature of dictionaries, glossaries, and word lists so that those encountering a word or name for the first time through standard orthography can learn how to pronounce it. Media professionals and public speakers will sometimes use phonetic transcription to make sure they are able to pronounce unfamiliar terms or personal names.

Within phonetic transcription there is a wide spectrum of detail that can be included or omitted based on the specific needs of the user. A distinction is often made between “broad” and “narrow” transcription, although there are no hard and fast boundaries around these terms. It is generally accepted that “broad” transcription provides detail only on the phonemic level, which is to say the discrete sound units in a given word or utterance. These phonemes are generally understood by speakers of a language to be the distinct sounds that make up their language. However, there may be subtle differences in the ways in which sounds are produced that do not register as differences for the language’s speakers.

For instance, in English, the word pot is pronounced with an aspirated p—that is, the p has an explosive burst of air that accompanies it when this word is pronounced. In contrast, the word spot does not have an aspirated p sound. (If you pronounce both of these words with a hand in front of your mouth, you should be able to feel the burst of air for the former and not the latter.) However, for an English speaker, while the pronunciation of spot with an aspirated p might sound unnatural, it does not change the meaning of the word. This is the case with aspiration generally in English. Therefore, the broadest English transcription does not distinguish between these sounds. In other languages aspiration may be extremely important in distinguishing meaning and thus included in broad transcription.

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In “narrow” phonetic transcription, details can be added using additional symbols, marks, diacritics, numbers, superscripts, subscripts, and so on to denote the length of vowels, aspiration, nasalization, tone, and other qualities of sound. These are helpful to scholars and medical professionals who are interested in the minute details of how sounds are produced by human anatomy and understood by the human brain.