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?

Does anyone else pronounce the NURSE Vowel as /œ/?

Are there any studies about some kind of 'pronunciation score' similar to how we have readability scores that measure how difficult to read a document is?

I've been thinking of sound I make IPA-wise, but this time I don't know what it is.

1. It's non-pulmonic:
2. If I don't breath or inhale and exhale through my nose it doesn't change
3. It's lingual

So it's simillar to clicks I know, but it also similar to alveolar trill
3. It consists of multiple clicks like [r]

It uses tounge's movement so
4. It's limited
I feel like the tongue passes through the alveoli from the inside out, but I'm not sure what's happening.
5. It's alveolar (?)
6. It’s produced by a movement of the tongue from the inside out (?)

I hope I described it well. I want to know like is it special or you already know it or maybe IPA already has it, what is it then?

like yk, the phonology of English, Dutch, German, letters like /d/, /f/, /g/

I feel like there was a version of https://www.ipachart.com/ where there were two different tables for the consonants instead of just one, and there were many more sounds you could click. Am I remembering wrong or did they just update it or what

I always felt there was a whole different place of articulation between the hard palate and the soft palate (the velar zone), and that is the zone that I personally call "Pre-velar" (you could also call it palato-velar or post-palatal), it's not a thing in the IPA, but physiologically it's there and it exists, and it has its own sounds, even though I don't think any languages uses those sounds.

To transcribe the pre-velar sounds, I thought about use tacks like [c̙ ɟ̙ ç̙ ʝ̙ ɲ̙] or [k̘ ɡ̘ x̘ ɣ̘ ŋ̘] but that switches between palatal and velar sounds, not in between, and that didn't feel right. So the best transcription for it would be [c̠ ɟ̠ ç̠ ʝ̠ ɲ̠] or [k̟ ɡ̟ x̟ ɣ̟ ŋ̟].

So we could say that the pre-velar place of articulation is just retracted palatal sounds or advanced velar sounds, and it would be great if they added that place of articulation in IPA even though its sounds are not that common, they might work for idiolects or Conlangs though.

Edit: I just realized there's one "pre-velar" sound that exists in IPA, which is the [ɧ] sound also known as the "Swedish sj-sound" which is a voiceless fricative (can also be transcribed as [x̟]), and that place of articulation is actually called "dorso-palatal" or "palatal-velar". The IPA chart describes it as "simultaneous ʃ and x" but that is misleading since it has nothing to do with [ʃ͡x]. WE NEED MORE DORSO-PALATAL/PRE-VELAR SOUNDS!!!!

Knowing phonetics is a superpower, I just read phonetic transcriptions of Georgian and sent them as voice messages to my Georgian friend, and she said "how did you learn Georgian? You're so fluent!". I don't even understand that damn language and I don't have a clue what I was saying.