voice&speech: IPA charts

IPA Charts

These charts were built in 2004 by Eric Armstrong with voicing by Paul Meier, and were made using Adobe's Flash technology. Now in 2021, Adobe has deprecated Flash, so no longer works for most people. However, I am using a technology called Ruffle.rs, an emulator written in the Rust scripting language, to allow users to see the Flash animations without actually using Flash.

At present, the IPA Charts on this site work in all known browsers!

Note that the chart lives on in another form via Paul Meier’s IPA app for the iPhone, available here: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/interactive-ipa/id873308318 . The Android version is available here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paulmeier.InteractiveIPA

IF THE PAGE IS STILL WORKING:

You will see a large orange "Play" button below. Click on it to make the chart work. These charts will link you to a Flash animation of the sounds and names of the IPA symbols that you'll be able to access through Ruffle.rs. The consonant chart, because it has so many sounds/symbols is large (1.8 MB), while the vowel chart is quite small and will load quickly.

The complete IPA is now available. IPA Chart, www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. Copyright © 2018 International Phonetic Association.

If you can't make this site work, there are alternatives. The one I like best with similar functionality is from the actual International Phonetic Association, https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/IPAcharts/inter_chart_2018/IPA_2018.html It has the added bonus of being both a symbol-sound chart (with 4 different voices, so you can hear 4 different, well-known phoneticians—including a woman—speak the sounds, AND you can use the chart to transcribe symbols in the top field on the page, which you can then copy and paste into a document.

But wait, there's even MORE! One is ipachart.com — I don’t like it as well, but it does work on all devices, and has a very memorable URL! Another very interesting alternative is "World Sounds" at UBC. that shows video of the tongue in action, based on ultrasound superimposed on a video of the speaker. It’s as if you could see through their head and into their mouth! Similarly, Seeing Speech’s charts, available at https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipa-charts/?chart=4, are very helpful, along with the mega-vowel comparison in the companion site Dynamic Dialects, do a great job of visualizing the tongue action with the help of Ultrasound and MRI imaging.

Questions?
Contact Eric Armstrong