In a Lingua Franca post a few weeks ago, I needed to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent the different pronunciations of the English word People still talk about speech sounds ...

We learn about 6 vowel letters and the numerous sounds we make when using them. In English, we have 5 (well, sometimes 6) vowel letters, but way more vowel sounds. That’s where the IPA can help us! We ...

We begin our discussion of phonetics, the study of speech sounds. The letters in a word don’t always match the sounds they represent, and people can pronounce words in different ways. We begin our ...

The acclaimed Haitian Canadian artist will perform songs from her new album ‘My World Is the Sun’ this March. My own high school had done a pretty good job of teaching us how to spell in the 1950s, so ...

The Journal of the International Phonetic Association (JIPA) is a forum for original research in the fields of phonetic theory and description and their phonological, typological and broader ...

English, whatever its merits as a language, is a bitch to spell. There are so many rules, and so many exceptions, and yet in the end you have to learn a lot of words on a case-by-case basis. If future ...

Backers of a universal alphabet say it will make pronunciation easy and foster international understanding. But can phonetic spelling systems really smooth the path to world peace? You are in Vietnam ...