The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabet of phonetic notation designed to capture all the different ways words in English can be pronounced, based on the Latin alphabet. It was designed by the International Phonetic Association (1999) as a standardised system for representing sounds of oral language. The IPA font most widely used is Doulos Sil, downloadable at:http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=doulossil_download
The IPA is particularly useful when it comes to describing individual sounds of spoken English. This is because in English there can be more way of pronouncing the same graphemes. For example, in English, there are two main ways of producing the <a> sound: bath or grass with a long or short . People from the south of England tend to pronounce the long and people from the North the short . In the West Midlands region of the UK, people tend to say Birmingum instead of Birmingham, missing out the and over articulating or over pronouncing the .
The standard form of spoken English or the reference accent for English is known as Received Pronunciation (RP), and it is this accent of English upon which IPA is based. RP is also called variously: BBC English, the Queen’s English or ‘Correct English’ and is the spoken form to which many learners of English as an additional language aspire. However, the idea of RP is wide ranging and encompassing, and the IPA tries to capture how people actually speak. The English language, as a living language, is also subject to change, including the ways in which words are pronounced. The BBC English we have today is very different from that of fifty years ago when presenters were required to take elocution lessons in RP. Today, the BBC has presenters from a wide range of backgrounds and no longer requires them to take elocution lessons. Similarly, the speech of the British Royal Family is different with each generation, so that the accent of the younger generation of the Royal Family is very different from that of older ones. Even so, IPA acts as a useful reference against which variation, including variation in RP, can be identified.
PRONUNCIATION 