Introduction to Accents 2: Phonetics

The International Phonetic Association created a system to represent the sounds of world languages. The Phonetic Alphabet is a useful tool for learning accents, too! Each symbol represents a single sound. Though it's hard to have a clear agreement on exactly what that is - the tool is used slightly differently by each person - there is a general agreement that serves well and is a transferable skill.

Some people make up their own alternative lettering system, but they're usually really crappy! These people must be stopped! Aaargh!

Yeah, it's not perfect, but at least it's something a bunch of experts agreed on. I haven't found a better way to talk about accents... Even the Lessac system of numbering many of the vowels, which I do use to some extent, has major limitations - especially when trying to describe sounds outside of typical General American. Though it's over 100 years old, the IPA is still the way to go.

Part 1: Accent vs Dialect vs Idiolect
Part 2: Phonetics
Part 3: Placement
Part 4: Intonation
Part 5: Helpful Hints
Part 6: Prioritizing Learning Accents

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The International Phonetic Alphabet - IPA

I want to talk a little bit about the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, as it tends to get used for describing accents. It doesn't handle everything.

There are a lot of other elements of accents that need to be explained a little bit, like placement and intonation, some of the rhythm of it, and then there are often times little keys for getting into it. And really for a lot of people it's very helpful to just listen to the recordings again and again and again of native speakers so that they can try to figure out hearing and replicating that accent.

But one of the things that can be something that's a tool for getting accessibility into the accent is the International Phonetic Alphabet.

So here's the full IPA chart (see above), and then you you can see sort of subdivisions of portions of it that go into the details on the consonants, at least the pulmonic consonants. The ones that come from the air flow from the lungs.

And getting into the vowels.

There are also non-pulmonic consonants as well, that are more like clicks.

And then you've got diacritics and suprasegmentals, that are little adjustments that you can make, so that you can tweak the sounds, and get into more details.

The IPA is a tool. It is one of the ways to do it, and different people use that tool in different ways. So not everybody will treat the IPA in the same way. Some people will use a symbol to demonstrate something slightly different from the way that somebody else would use it. But, in general, it's a helpful way to be able to talk about sounds.

Why a whole new alphabet?

Now you would hope that you could just use the alphabet to do that, but unfortunately you know we have this one letter of a in the alphabet, but there are all kinds of a sounds that we associate with that. We have the ah sound like FATHER. We have the ayh sound like CAT. We have the awh sound that's kind of like a rounded a, that is this one turned around the other way. We also have the aw sound, aw how do you demonstrate this A W? Well you do it with yet another symbol that's this, what's called an open o. So there are all these different A's. There are all these different aye sounds.

How do you demonstrate those?

Well I've actually seen people who've kind of developed their own symbols to represent it, which is just even more confusing.

The IPA was created by the International Phonetic Association who, which was a group of folks who basically came together and said let's find a way to describe these in a common way. So when some people make up a whole new way to demonstrate it, it's just kind of a pain in the butt because they're doing something outside of something that's at least been agreed upon.

Even though it's challenging to figure this thing out, it's a way to demonstrate it, and it's part of why then we go into demonstrating the sound changes on the recordings that come along with the materials. It's part of what you need that's helpful beyond the written work.

So the IPA is a tool, and it's a tool that we definitely use with Accent Help and that you'll find in various dialect materials that you could find online and in books and such. And if they don't use the IPA, it's probably a good thing to stay away from, because they're really just creating more problems that won't be translatable into what other people are using.

That's a quick intro to the phonetics, the IPA, and why they're used for teaching accents.