The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a standardized system used to represent the sounds of spoken language. Each symbol in the IPA corresponds to a specific sound, or phoneme, found in languages worldwide. This allows linguists, language learners, and teachers to accurately depict pronunciation, regardless of the language being transcribed. For example, the English word "cat" would be represented in IPA as /kæt/. The IPA helps overcome inconsistencies in spelling and pronunciation across different languages, making it easier to learn how to speak and understand languages accurately.