International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. It is intended as a notational standard for the phonemic and phonetic representation of all spoken languages.

Suprasegmentals

Tone and intonation

Note:

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• Unicode does not have separate encodings for most of the contour tones. Instead, sequences of level tone marks are used, with proper display dependent on the font, usually by means of OpenType font rendition: {{IPA|}} or {{IPA|}}. (These are probably not displaying correctly in your browser. See the for a few representative examples of how they should appear.) Since very few fonts support such combinations of tone marks, a common solution is to use the old system of superscript numerals from '1' to '5', for example . However, this depends on local linguistic tradition, with '5' generally being high and '1' being low for Asian languages, but '1' being high and '5' low for African languages. An old IPA convention sometimes still seen is to use sub-diacritics for low contour tones: {{IPA|}} for low-falling and low-rising.
• The upstep and downstep diacritics are superscript arrows. Unicode currently does not have separate encodings for them.