Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation)

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✔ This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Editors should follow it, except where common sense and the occasional exception will improve an article. Before editing this page, please make sure that your revision reflects consensus.
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English pronunciation in Wikipedia should be transcribed in such a way that its interpretation does not depend on the reader's dialect. For this end, broad transcriptions of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) should be used, as outlined at Help:pronunciation, and the first instance should include a link to that page. "Sound-alike" transcriptions may be used in addition to the IPA.

For foreign pronunciations, a phonetic transcription is normally used, with a link to Help:IPA. Phonemic transcriptions require a link to the phonology of the language in question.

Other options are to link to the corresponding entry in Wiktionary, or to include an audio file.

See also:

Contents

[edit] Other transcription systems

If a language is not usually written in the Latin alphabet, an official romanisation may exist for it. For example, pinyin for Mandarin Chinese or the Royal Thai General System of Transcription. In such cases, both the romanisation and the IPA rendering may be given.

For English words, transcriptions based on English spelling ("pronunciation respellings") such as /proh-NUN-see-AY-shən/ may be used, but only in addition to the IPA. These should be unambiguous. If they happen to conform to Help:Pronunciation respelling key, a link to that page may be provided.

Some articles have in the past used SAMPA (or X-SAMPA), which is a way of indicating IPA without using the special IPA characters. The need for SAMPA has essentially disappeared since the introduction of Template:IPA (see below), which works around the broken display of IPA characters in Internet Explorer. Readers are generally not familiar with SAMPA, and Wikipedia's current practice is to replace it with IPA.

Ad-hoc descriptions such as "rhymes with both" or "rhymes with paid" may be useful for describing English sounds, but many such descriptions (e.g. "rhymes with bath", "rhymes with caught") will be interpreted differently depending on the reader's dialects, so caution is advised and they should not be used alone.

[edit] IPA style

Whenever the IPA appears in an article, it should be contained within the {{IPA}} template. This ensures that the symbols display properly in browsers such as Internet Explorer, which do not support the IPA natively. Note that the [brackets] should be inside the {{IPA}} template for uniformity of the font.

When using the IPA, provide an explanation for the reader. If there are multiple instances of IPA in an article, you may want to use the template {{IPA notice}} at the top of the page. However, if there are only a few instances of IPA, you may instead wish to link the first to one of the help keys, such as:

(pronounced {{IPA|[[Help:pronunciation|/aɪ piː eɪ/]]}})

This yields:

(pronounced /aɪ piː eɪ/)

The shortcut:

({{pron-en|aɪ piː eɪ}})

yields the same:

(pronounced /aɪ piː eɪ/)

with the same link.

(See below for help keys to transcribe English vs. foreign words in the IPA.)

When you link an audio sample, please use {{Audio-IPA}} or {{Audio-IPA-nohelp}} so that the IPA class is applied to any IPA text that is displayed.

When a specific phonetic pronunciation is indicated, as in foreign names, this is marked by square brackets. Normally a reader won't know the structure of the language in question well enough for a phonemic transcription in slashes to be useful. The use of slashes is only permitted in cases where the pronunciation represents phonemes, as in broad transcriptions of English. However, phonetic transcriptions of English may be useful to represent a specific dialect, local or historical pronunciations, or how a person pronounces their own name. For example, the English name Florence would normally be given the generic transcription /ˈflɒrəns/, but in the case of Florence Nightingale we have a recording of her saying her name, and she pronounces it [ˈflɒɾəns], with a flapped ar [ɾ] that is no longer the norm in English. Non-universal pronunciations such as these should be clearly marked for what they are.

[edit] Distinction between British, American and Australian pronunciation

It is often possible to transcribe a word in a generic way that is not specific to any one dialect, for example observation as /ɒbsɚveɪʃən/. Speakers of non-rhotic dialects, as in much of the UK, will pronounce this [ɒbsəveɪʃən], and those who merge /ɒ/ and /ɑ/, as in much of the US, will pronounce it [ɑbsɚveɪʃən], but since such variation on the part of the speaker is automatic, it doesn't need to be spelled out, at least not in the case of a simple pronunciation guide to a key word in an article. Indeed, the Help:pronunciation key, designed for readers who are unfamiliar with the IPA, simply defines the symbol /ɚ/ as the sound at the end of runner, and warns that it may not be distinct from /ə/ for some people. That is, there is normally little point is transcribing observation as "[ɒbsɚveɪʃən], [ɒbsəveɪʃən], [ɑbsɚveɪʃən], or [ɑbsəveɪʃən], depending on dialect".

If the pronunciation in a specific dialect is desired, square brackets may be used, perhaps with a link to International Phonetic Alphabet for English or IPA chart for English, which describe several national standards (these do not yet cover South African, Irish, or Indian English), or with a comment that the pronunciation is GA or RP. In the case of Australian English, there are dedicated IPA templates, {{IPA-en-au}} and {{pron-en-au}}, which link to Australian English phonology. Local pronunciations are of particular interest in the case of place names. If there are both local and national or international standards, it may be beneficial to list both.

[edit] Foreign names

When transcribing foreign names, you may write two transcriptions: the native pronunciation and English pronunciation. When a foreign name has a usual English pronunciation (or pronunciations), include both the English and foreign-language pronunciations; the English transcription must always be first. If the native name is different from the English name, the native transcription must be after the native name.

For example:

({{IPA-en|ˌvɛnəˈzwelə}};
 [[Spanish language|Spanish]]:            ''República Bolivariana de Venezuela'',
 {{IPA-all|reˈpuβlika βoliβaˈɾjana ðe βeneˈswela}})

which gives:

(IPA: /ˌvɛnəˈzwelə/; Spanish: República Bolivariana de Venezuela, IPA: [reˈpuβlika βoliβaˈɾjana ðe βeneˈswela])

Similarly,

({{pron-en|ˌvɛnəˈzwelə}};
 [[Spanish language|Spanish]]:            ''República Bolivariana de Venezuela'',
 {{pronounced|reˈpuβlika βoliβaˈɾjana ðe βeneˈswela}})

gives:

(pronounced /ˌvɛnəˈzwelə/; Spanish: República Bolivariana de Venezuela, pronounced [reˈpuβlika βoliβaˈɾjana ðe βeneˈswela])

Transcriptions should always have a label identifying what language they are transcribing.

In the case of there being two different standards for a single language, you should choose the most appropriate. For example, write [beneˈswela], according to Latin-American Spanish, not [beneˈθwela]; that is European standard pronunciation.

However, in language articles such as Spanish phonology, where the phonology is made explicit, examples may be given in either phonetic or phonemic notation, depending on the point being made, as the reader will have the information available to make sense of either. If for some reason it is desired to indicate the pronunciation of a foreign word phonemically in a non-linguistic article, a link should be provided to the phonology of the language in question. If a large number of such links are made for a specific language, it may be best to transclude them through a template, such as {{IPA-ga}} for Irish, so that they may be managed as a group and kept theoretically consistent. If you are not able to create such a template, please request one here on the Discussion page.

[edit] Tone

Tone should be indicated for transcriptions of tonal languages. Because tone numbers are ambiguous—the reader may not know whether [ma4] is supposed to be high tone, low tone, or a tone number, for example, IPA transcriptions should use diacritic marks or tone letters unless the article explains the numbering system.

[edit] Technical issues

Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows doesn't automatically use a font that contains specialized IPA characters. Passages of IPA text should be placed within the template {{IPA}}, which tells Explorer to choose the correct font. More detailed documentation is at Template talk:IPA. Even in Firefox, which will look for font containing the missing character, not using the template may cause different characters within the same word to be rendered in differing fonts.

An example, placing a phonetic rendering of the word characters in Template:IPA:

{{IPA|/ˈkærəktɚz/}}

In your browser:

without template:IPA: /ˈkærəktɚz/
with template:IPA: /ˈkærəktɚz/

You should not see a difference between the two, unless you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows, or you have a custom stylesheet for IPA.

[edit] Entering IPA characters

Many IPA characters cannot be typed with a regular keyboard layout, but there are various ways to enter them.

Beneath the edit box on Wikipedia is a character map.
Just click the one you want, and it’ll be added at the insertion point in the edit box.
Copy and paste them from elsewhere (other articles or websites, for example)
Many of the familiar Latin letters can be typed with a normal English keyboard layout. However,
( ɡ ) note the open tail g
( ː ) note the length mark is a different character from a colon
( ˈ ) note the primary stress mark is a different character from a typewriter apostrophe
On Mac English keyboard layouts, a few special characters can be typed:
option-c for ç
option-o for ø
option-q for œ
option-' for æ
Enter them using a special character utility
On Mac OS X, use the Character Palette: choose the "Phonetic Symbols" category and double-click on a character to enter it
Type them with a custom keyboard layout
For Mac OS X, download the IPA-SIL keyboard layout

[edit] Numeric entry

The following methods require you to know the Unicode code point of the character you wish to enter: for example, the IPA symbol [ɒ] is represented by the hexadecimal value U+0252. See the resources links below for reference charts.

Enter them using a numeric keyboard input method
On most Windows keyboard layouts, type alt-0-2-5-2 for ɒ
On Mac OS X, use the Unicode Hex Input keyboard layout, type option-0-2-5-2 for ɒ
Enter them into wikitext as HTML character entities
Character entity reference (list): enter æ for æ
Numeric character reference (decimal): enter ɒ for ɒ
Numeric character reference (hexadecimal): enter ɒ for ɒ

[edit] Resources

[edit] Related templates

  • {{IPA}} allows proper display of IPA characters.
    • {{IPA-all}} has square brackets and a link to Help:IPA; it is useful for foreign languages and specific dialects of English.
    • {{IPA-en}} has slashes and a link to Help:pronunciation; it is useful for general English pronunciations.
    • {{pronounced}} and {{pron-en}} are similar but display the link as "pronounced" rather than "IPA".
    • {{IPAlink}} and {{IPAlink-en}} are similar but have no introductory wording.
  • {{Audio-IPA}} links to an audio file for pronunciation
  • {{IPA notice}} is a message that warns the reader of the presence of IPA characters
  • {{Cleanup-IPA}} is a request for inclusion of IPA pronunciation.

Specific templates for foreign languages are:

[edit] See also