ABSTRACT
The International Phonetic Alphabet is a means of symbolizing the segments and certain non-segmental features of any language or accent, using a set of symbols and diacritics drawn up by the International Phonetic Association (IPA). It is one of a large number of phonetic alphabets that have been devised in Western Europe, but in terms of influence and prestige it is now the most highly regarded of them all. Hundreds of published works have employed it. It is used throughout the world by a variety of professionals concerned with different aspects of speech, including phoneticians, linguists, dialectologists, philologists, speech scientists, speech therapists, teachers of the deaf, language teachers, and devisers of orthographic systems.
