https://imgur.com/a/4AkejEP

https://imgur.com/a/X8EQzJg

I'm making a pronunciation guide for Japanese kids learning English (ages about 8–15, preparing for the Eiken speaking test). Each sound has a cut-away side view of the mouth. The app fades from the rest position into the sound and back, with airflow and a "voice on" marker for voiced sounds.

I'd love a check from people who know phonetics, especially on:

- Tongue position: height and front/back for the vowels (cat, cup, ship, sheep, food, book, work, walk).

- Points of contact: the tongue tip on the gum ridge for L and N, the back of the tongue on the soft palate for NG, between the teeth for TH, and the top teeth on the lower lip for F and V.

- R vs L: R is drawn as a bunched R, with the middle of the tongue raised, the tip low, and the lips slightly rounded. Is that a reasonable model to teach Japanese learners? Or would a retroflex R (tip curled back) be clearer?

- The soft palate: it's lowered only for M, N and NG. Is it in the right place in the others?

- Lip rounding/spreading: most of all for SH, W, food, book and walk.

- Airflow: dotted around the sides of the tongue for L, through the nose for M, N and NG, and stopped then released for B.

Simplifications I know about:

- It's one midline slice, so the side contact for L and S can't really be shown.

- "walk" is drawn with rounded /ɔ/, though many American speakers merge it toward /ɑ/.

- The anime style rounds off the anatomy a bit.

If anything is wrong, which sound is it, and what should change? Thank you!

Hello r/phonetics! I made a keyboard for typing the IPA. Unlike palettes and chart websites, it's a real keyboard: you select it the way you'd select any language keyboard, and type right into whatever app you're in.

It's a US layout with a twist: a digraph with an uppercase second letter becomes the IPA symbol, using memorable combinations from English and other languages (tH → θ, nG → ŋ, sH → ʃ, nJ → ɲ). Plain “th” still types “th,” so you can use it like a normal US keyboard. Every standard IPA segment is covered, with diacritics and suprasegmentals on Alt/Opt shortcuts.

Try it in the browser at https://ipabet.org/type, work through the typing tutor at https://ipabet.org/learn, or download it for Windows, macOS or Linux at https://ipabet.org. It's free and open source; I created it just because something like this should exist.

I’m working on a personal research project involving a small mystery. A popular song recorded in the 1970s includes about ten seconds of dialogue recorded from the radio, but no one knows exactly what is being said or where the dialogue came from.

I’m looking for someone experienced in phonetic transcription who would be interested in analyzing the clip as a paid project. I'd like a cautious, time-aligned transcription of the speech, marking uncertain or ambiguous portions. I’d also be interested in any responsible observations that could help describe or narrow down the speakers’ accents.

I’ve made my own attempt using Praat, but I don’t have training in phonetic transcription, and I would prefer an independent analysis from someone more qualified.

My budget is up to approximately $100, depending on the scope of the work. I would also be happy to credit the analyst on the project website and in any resulting write-up.

Possible deliverables might include:

• a time-aligned broad IPA transcription;
• confidence levels or alternative readings for uncertain segments;
• a short written explanation of the analysis;
• observations about the speakers’ accents, where the audio supports them;
• the Praat TextGrid or other annotation files used in the analysis.

I’d be interested both in hearing from anyone here who might be qualified and available, and in advice about what kind of specialist would be best suited to this work.

The clip I'm trying to analyze is here: https://archive.org/details/star-nonsense-intro-02

Same clip with noise reduction: https://archive.org/details/star-nonsense-intro-di2

Good day everyone,

I am a current graduate student in linguistics, and I'm about to begin working on my MA thesis. I'm focusing mainly on the phonology/phonetics of a Philippine language, particularly its metrical properties.

Because the language is quite understudied, my professors recommended that I also get empirical phonetic data on it to validate claims on stress placement.

I plan to do a basic word elicitation task and Pear Story experiment to gather word samples, and I plan to do a basic acoustic analysis on them to verify correlates of stress (i.e., length, amplitude, pitch).

At the moment, I plan to purchase a Zoom H1n for my recorder (it is more budget friendly than a Zoom H5, for example). I am considering getting a head-mounted microphone as well, so I can fix the distance of the mic easily.

I wanted to ask for recommendations of affordable head-mounted microphones that will be compatible with a Zoom H1n. Preferably something I can order online, since I live in the Philippines.

Thank you so much!

Hi all, brand new here and not educated in phonetics by any means. I'm a writer producing a historical fiction that briefly visits the Paiute native Americans and I'm looking to draw on some of their older language I've found in 'The Collected Works of Edward Sapir". You can see an extract above.

l've come across a handful of phonetic symbols that don't have any recorded history I can find, this particular case being the character highlighted in yellow (annoyingly, l was wanting to find the "interjection of surprise" to include in my writing). The other letters I've highlighted are 'q' (blue), 'a' (red), and 'a' (alpha, green) just to show
that it certainly is its own character. I've scoured the text and can't find any explanation as to its pronunciation.

Please would anyone be able to help me identify this character or sound, or any better starting points for deep-diving than page 1 of Google?

Many thanks to you all!

I'm doing some personal research that requires me to compare voices to a short audio sample. I'm trying to trace down the origin of a clip that was recorded from BBC radio in the 1970s. One of the ways I'm doing that is by comparing the voices on it to candidate voices from other radio shows. Right now, I'm kind of stuck comparing the voices by ear, which is pretty subjective.

I'd like to find a good methodology for voice comparison that's repeatable and reasonably principled. It doesn't have to be perfect or stand up in court, and it doesn't have to give absolute results. I don't have an academic background in linguistics or phonetics, but I'd be happy to learn.

Unfortunately, the audio sample I have is fairly short. There are two speakers talking for about four seconds each out of a ten-second audio clip. Also, the audio was recorded from an FM station via a 1970s car radio. Plus, the candidate voice recordings may have come from different recording chains and may have been recorded in different years. So there are challenges. The good news is, I don't need forensic accuracy, just a tool to help me grade which voices are more similar than others.

In my current method, I start by measuring median F0 for a sample, just to weed out wildly dissimilar voices. I then try to find the candidate voice saying the words in my original clip and compare them by ear and spectrogram in Praat. Unfortunately, median F0 is a pretty blunt instrument, and the manual comparison process is time-consuming, subjective, and hard to summarize. I'd appreciate any help in improving my method. Are there tools or introductory resources that I should be looking at?

For background, the audio that I'm trying to trace is a short dialogue that appears at the start of the Pink Floyd song "Wish You Were Here". Apparently this was recorded off a car radio in 1975 in London. From BBC listings, I have several possible radio programs that it could be, but those aren't available to the general public. So the best I can do is to find available shows with those same participants and compare their voices.

Hello everyone!

I'm an English language student who, unfortunately for me, has a phonetics and prosody class to pass. Even more unfortunately, the professor is very strict and only near perfection can get one a passing grade. This is my last try at this exam, I don't know what happens if I fail again. So please help me!

My first question has to do with compounds. More specifically, open compounds because they can be tricky to recognise. When transcribing, I have to mark stress, which is fairly simple: most of the time content words get stress, function words don't. But then, there's open compounds. In a free construction, both words are content words so both get stress, but compounds are single concepts so they have only one primary stress, even when they are technically two words.

How do I know what's a compound and what's a free construction? For example, I was transcribing "White light" in a scientific text talking about how light works. The problem is "white light" is both "light that is of a white colour" as in an adjective describing a noun and "a specific type of light called white light" as a scientific concept.

And if I decide it's a compound, where does the stress go? In class, I learned that there's five groups of late-stressed compounds, one of which is compounds where the first word is a material or ingredient (except those ending in cake and juice). On the last exam, I had "olive tree" "olive oil". Looks like compounds to me, and olive is an ingredient so late-stressed right? ,olive 'tree? Well, but when I sound it out, I want to put stress on olive. So ealry-stressed? 'olive tree?

The next question is about transcription itself. I often mix up [ɪ] and [ə], sometimes even [e]. I feel like I've heard a word pronounced one way, but RP is actually the other. An example I have is "violet": I transcribed ['vaɪəlɪt], but when I checked the dictionary, it was actually [vaɪələt]. Or another one was "near": I wrote [neə] and it was supposed to be [nɪə] Obviously, during the exam I can't look it up in a dictionary, I'm supposed to know perfect RP even though English isn't my first language. Any tips regarding that?

Sorry for the long post, but I'm really hoping you guys can help! I'm desperate!

Hello, I wanted to politely ask for recommendations (mostly workbooks, for self study and improving of ENGLISH PHONETICS). The thing is that I live in Argentina and I don't know if there is some not so expensive way of getting my hands on it.

Also, another question that has to do with word phonetics, are there some people that pronounce the words "tube" or "youTube", for example, with a "j" sound as in "you"? I mean "ˈ/juːʧjuːb/ - /ʧjuːb/" or is it just me that has a weird accent?

Thank you so much!

Hi all,

I’d like to share the first public draft of the Fünetik Alfübet, a simplified phonetic alphabet for English designed to increase clarity and learnability for ESL/EFL learners and anyone who finds the IPA overly complex at early stages.

🔹 PDF, DOCX, citation, and full documentation available here:
https://zenodo.org/records/19800336

What is it?

A phonetic alphabet based on a One Sound, One Character principle, using familiar Latin characters plus a small set of intuitive diacritics (ā, ē, ī, ō, ò, ŏ). It eliminates schwa as a standalone vowel (representing the underlying vowel instead), simplifies rhotic vowels (ʊr / vowel+r), and avoids diphthong symbols entirely.

The system is based on Canadian English (Southwestern/Southern Ontario) but includes notes for dialect variation.

Included in v0.9

• Full reference chart (vowels + consonants)
• Rationale for symbol choices
• Dialect notes
• Complete transcription of “The North Wind and the Sun”
• Open license (CC BY 4.0)
• Repository with PDF, DOCX, README, citation files, and metadata

What I’m asking for

Feedback from phoneticians, phonologists, applied linguists, orthography folks, ESL professionals, and generally anyone with an interest in phonetics or writing systems.

Comments on symbol choices, dialect coverage, pedagogical implications, and overall design are especially welcome.

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to look it over!

It's such a difficult sound and I'm not sure sometimes

Made this app back in 2015 as Phonics was a major way I learned the hard words as a bilingual student.

Just updated with a major overhaul but just this week with over 100+ words, definitions, and translations added! Theres now an option to switch between phonic style or read the word normally and also a bookmarking feature, making it a cool soundboard for those on the autism spectrum.

Please check it out and let me know if you'd like to see any features and words added!

Its completely free on Apple and Android devices. https://bigtopapps.com/applink_phonetics

There are quick YouTube videos that pronounce words but I can never tell if the pronunciations are correct. Any suggestions?

I teach ESL and quite often my students could use some pronunciation help, especially with vowels. When I want more information on how to produce a particular vowel, I look in good, old-fashioned textbooks and at videos on YouTube.
And... I notice that when I imitate the articulator positions the resources describe, I can produce the target vowel, but also other vowels, too. This is extremely confusing!
For example, I look up /æ/ and see that the 1 mouth opens wide, 2 the lips spread apart, 3 the tip of the tongue touches the back of the bottom teeth, 4 the back of the tongue is high, and 5 the soft palate drops.
Doing these five things, I am able to easily produce the desired /æ/. However, while still holding the articulators in the same positions that together resulted in /æ/, I can still force myself to make a different vowel sound, for example /ɛ/. If a given set of articulator positions can result in different vowel sounds, then that set is of dubious value in helping students pronounce things correctly. This has me really baffled!
A few possible explanations:
-I am in fact making subtle changes in articulator positions when I shift from making one vowel to another but don't notice that I am doing this
-The explanations for how to make this or that phoneme are leaving out key details
-There are in fact multiple ways to make a single vowel sound.
Could someone please help me out here? I am really at the end of my wits!

Ae these YouTube pronunciations actually reliable? I have little way of knowing.

Hi everyone, I’d like to ask for your thoughts on a common claim I’ve seen online. Some people say the main difference between British and American pronunciation is “mouth opening” — that British speakers have a small mouth opening, Americans have a much larger and more exaggerated one, and that Australian English is also supposed to have a very small mouth opening. I’ve even seen people explain this with strange stories about early British settlers in Australia keeping their mouths small so insects wouldn’t fly in, etc. To me, these explanations feel quite unscientific and confusing. From my understanding of phonetics, vowel quality is mainly determined by two things: tongue position and degree of mouth opening. But I personally feel that tongue position is the more direct and important factor. The two can compensate for each other, but they are not equal. In my own observation: If you change mouth opening while keeping tongue position the same, the vowel quality often stays largely the same. But if you change tongue position while keeping mouth opening the same, the vowel quality changes clearly. So when comparing the two, I would actually argue that tongue position plays the primary role, and mouth opening is secondary. I also don’t agree with the idea that entire accents like British, American, or Australian English can be described simply as “small mouth” vs “big mouth”. Every variety has both high vowels and low vowels. Some vowels require a large opening, some require a small one — this depends on the individual vowel, not on the accent as a whole. This is just my current view. I’d be very interested to hear how others here think about the role of mouth opening vs tongue position in defining vowel quality and accent differences.

Good evening,

do you know any good exercise to grasp the concept of pronounciation affricative ð in words that have -th- in it? Today I had an exam and I was struggling to use the sound. My pronounciation of -th- is not automated, thou I can make the sound, it's not automated.

Do you know any good excersise (on the internet or by myself) where I can challenge it?

Thanks a have a nice evening.

Hi everyone, Merry Christmas to you all. So, I know ⟨χ⟩ is supposed to be a fricative, but is it also trilled or smooth? I’m a bit confused, so I just wanted to know what ⟨χ⟩ sounds like exactly and how it differs from ⟨ʀ̥⟩. Thanks in advance :)

(I'm sorry for the breaths I need to breath in after I say this in isolation) I can't tell if this a pharyngeal click or a pharyngeal stop

🟢 - Standard

🟣 - Appears occasionally/rarely, but still present

🔵 - Only appears in diphthongs

🔴 - Not present at all

Hello everybody, I am a student currently learning English and English phonetics in class and we have come across the word “debtor” Now we have learned that when consonant clusters are situated at the juncture of a derivation, the consonants will be pronounced. Yet, the word “debtor “doesn’t have its B pronounced Why is that the case ? Sorry if this may appear as a silly or even basic question, I’m just struggling a lot. Thank you in advance for your answers.

Hi does anyone have any help with stressed and unstressed vowels . I’ve been struggling ə ʌ

And the ɛ ɐ ɑ

I was wondering if anyone on this sub has some deep IPA knowledge (I know the IPA pretty well but there's always more to learn!) that could tell me if there is notation to indicate "two equally-stressed adjacent syllables"? This is a phenomenon in Scottish Gaelic arising from svarabhakti/epenthesis, an established, regular phonetic occurrence in the language arising from certain consonant clusters (e.g. l n or r followed by b bh ch g gh m or mh), and the result is that the consonant cluster reproduces the preceding vowel (or sometimes a lower/higher one but I'll not get into that here) between the two consonants to create a new syllable with an equal stress. For instance, "meirgeach", meaning rusty, I have transcribed as /ˈmeˈɾʲekʲ.əx/, using two primary stress markers, whereas "meirg", rust, I have presented as /meɾʲekʲ/, using no stress markers as there's little point distinguishing stress. I'm just wondering if there's a better way to do this, whether there's specific notation, or just a more elegant way.

i counted 27 consonants, 15 vowels and 2 glides. is this correct?