The International Phonetic Alphabet

• Links
• HTML Character Entities for the Phonemes of Standard British English
• Unicode Ranges for the IPA
• Fonts for the IPA
• CSS for the IPA

Links

The University of Victoria has a very nice copy of the IPA chart which has each character as a gif so you can see what you should be getting! It also has mp3 files so you can hear them. Lovely!

Dom Smith's on-line conversion of IPA to decimal Unicode. Great!

Comprehensive Unicode test page for the IPA from David McCreedy's Gallery of Unicode Fonts

Character entity codes for the IPA from Penn State University.

The International Phonetic Association.

HTML Character Entities for the Phonemes of Standard British English

Pure vowels:

Diphthongs:

Consonants:

Unicode Ranges for the IPA

The phonemes of British English require the following Unicode ranges:

• Basic Latin
• Latin-1 Supplement: ð æ
• Latin Extended-A: ŋ
• IPA Extensions
• Greek and Coptic: θ

At the time of writing, the current version of the IPA Alphabet is 1993 (updated in 1996).

Unicode ranges for the current IPA phonetic consonant/vowel symbol codes:

• Basic Latin
• Latin-1 Supplement: ð ç ø æ
• Latin Extended-A: ŋ ħ œ
• Latin Extended-B: ǀ ǃ ǂ ǀ
• IPA Extensions
• Greek and Coptic: β θ χ
• Superscripts and Subscripts - ⁿ

Unicode ranges for the current IPA phonetic diacritic and suprasegmental symbol codes:

• Basic Latin: . |
• Spacing Modifier Letters
• Combining Diacritical Marks
• General Punctuation: ‖ ‿
• Superscripts and Subscripts: ⁿ
• Arrows: ↗ ↘ ↓ ↑

Unicode ranges for transcription delimitation characters:

• Basic Latin

A few things that I found curious:

• Phi (ɸ) has its own Unicode code point instead of using the one from the Greek and Coptic range.
• The click represented by ǃ has its own Unicode code point instead of using the exclamation mark from Basic Latin.
• The clicks represented by ǀ and ǁ have their own code points in the Unicode range. They are thinner than the suprasegmental symbols | (Basic Latin) and ‖ (General Punctuation).

Fonts for the IPA

Don't use Mozilla/Firefox if you want to test which glyphs are missing from a font - it's too clever at using an alternative font.

The best test page I've come across is David McCreedy's Gallery of Unicode Fonts. You can select from a list of the commonest fonts used for the whole IPA or you can type in the name of any other font on your system. The stylesheet specifies Verdana, Arial, so it will use these until you specify something else, or if the font which you specified is not installed on your system.

If you are looking at a font which was not specifically designed for the IPA, as well as checking whether the glyphs are available, you should check the glyph for lower case a from the Basic Latin range. It mustn't look like the "script a" (ɑ).

The following list of fonts has been compiled, without much investigation, from thesesources: David McCreedy's Gallery of Unicode Fonts, Alan Wood's Unicode Resources, UCL Department of Phonetics & Linguistics.

Possible Unicode fonts for the IPA:

CSS for the IPA

Firefox/Mozilla is pretty clever about finding glyphs for the IPA, but Internet Explorer needs to have the fonts specified. For this reason it might be worth using the Internet Explorer conditional comments, although these only apply to IE on Windows. Quirksmode has a good explanation of how these work.

The following string is only a suggestion, aimed at comprehensive coverage of the IPA. The best string will depend on your situation. Factors include:

• loose or strict transcription, eg Do you need the diacritics?
• certain languages or all, eg Do you need click symbols?
• where will the pages be available, eg Is it an intranet where you can predict the platform, browsers or fonts?

I chose to put the downloadable fonts first on the basis that people who have these installed probably like them. Also, fonts designed specifically for the IPA are more likely to have comprehensive coverage even in the earliest font versions. They're not in any particular order. Since I only need to display the phonemes of British English, I haven't investigated which ones have the most comprehensive coverage.

Lucida Sans Unicode is important as a catch-all for Windows systems. (If the user has deleted it, tough!) But it's not very pretty or legible, so I've put it at the end of the list as a last resort.

I use sans-serif for the generic font family because this is better than serif for on-screen reading. A page which is designed to be printed might prefer serif.

Suggested style:

.ipa   	{ font-family: Gentium, "Doulos SIL", Cardo, Junicode, Code2000, "TITUS Cyberbit Basic", "Arial Unicode MS", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "MS Mincho", sans-serif; }

Home