Pronunciation respelling for English
Phonetic keys in English dictionaries / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For the pronunciation respelling system used in Wikipedia, see Help:Pronunciation respelling key.
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography (i.e. the spelling does not reliably indicate pronunciation).
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This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
There are two basic types of pronunciation respelling:
- "Phonemic" systems, as commonly found in American dictionaries, consistently use one symbol per English phoneme. These systems are conceptually equivalent to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) commonly used in bilingual dictionaries and scholarly writings but tend to use symbols based on English rather than Romance-language spelling conventions (e.g. ē for IPA /i/) and avoid non-alphabetic symbols (e.g. sh for IPA /ʃ/).
- On the other hand, "non-phonemic"[1] or "newspaper"[2] systems, commonly used in newspapers and other non-technical writings, avoid diacritics and literally "respell" words making use of well-known English words and spelling conventions, even though the resulting system may not have a one-to-one mapping between symbols and sounds.
As an example, one pronunciation of Arkansas, transcribed /ˈɑːrkənsɔː/ in the IPA, could be respelled är′kən-sô′[3] or AR-kən-saw in a phonemic system and ar-kuhn-saw in a non-phonemic system.