5 Fun Facts About the

International Phonetic
Alphabet
Erika Iwakiri, Daniel Antônio, Debora
Dellamoura
Font: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/83340/11-fun-facts-
about-international-phonetic-alphabet

Written by Arika Okrent

1. ITS ORIGINAL PURPOSE WAS TO
MAKE TEACHING FOREIGN
LANGUAGES EASIER.
When you learn a foreign language, you're naturally drawn to
pronounce the letters you see in the written form as you
would in your own language. A language teacher named Paul
Passy thought it would be better to start with a purely
phonetic writing system in order to avoid this contamination.
He founded the International Phonetic Association in Paris in
1886.
2. IT EXPANDED TO INCLUDE MORE
AND MORE LANGUAGES.

The original version could handle the sounds in French,

English, and German. Later revisions added symbols for
pharyngeals (e.g., [ʕ], used in Arabic), retroflex consonants
([ɖ], used in Hindi), clicks ([ǂ], used in Khoisan languages),
and a range of other speech sounds. Now it can handle
nearly any spoken language.
3. IT GREW FROM ABOUT
40 TO ALMOST 200
SYMBOLS.
The first version of the IPA had 30 consonants
and 13 vowels plus a few diacritics. There are
now more than double the number of consonants
and vowels, plus diacritics, tone markers, and
other combining symbols that allow the potential
for thousands of different sounds to be
represented.
4. IT CAN REPRESENT A KISS, A
RASPBERRY, OR VOCAL FRY.
Because bilabial clicks ([ʘ] a kissing sound),
bilabial trills ([ʙ] blowing a raspberry, but
without the tongue sticking out), and creaky
voiced articulations ([a̰] “vocal fry”) show up as
speech sounds in some languages, they get IPA
symbols too.
 5. THERE WERE SPECIAL PHONETIC
SYMBOL TYPEWRITERS FOR WRITING
IN IPA.
To make the task of writing in the phonetic alphabet more
convenient, typewriters were modified or produced
especially for this task. They could be pricey, though:
Models publicized in a 1912 supplement to Le Maître
Phonétique would cost $1600 and $3200 today.