Phonetic Symbols, Keyboards and Transcription

This page provides some information and resources for the use of the International Phonetics Association alphabet of phonetic symbols for the transcription of speech using computers.

Unicode Phonetic Keyboard and SIL Fonts

The Unicode Phonetic Keyboard is an installable keyboard for Windows PCs that provides a convenient keyboard layout for the word-processing of phonetic transcription using Unicode fonts. The installation package comes complete with two Unicode fonts: Doulos and Charis that have been developed by SIL.

• Download Unicode Phonetic Keyboard 1.10 (self-install executable, 2MB)
• Download Keyboard Layout (PDF)
• Download Windows 10 installation instructions (PDF)

Guide to the use of Unicode Phonetic Symbols

John Wells has written a number of pages which give more information about the set of phonetic symbols available in Unicode, and about how these can be used in Microsoft Word and other applications:

• The IPA Symbols in Unicode
• Guide to Using Unicode Phonetic Symbols

IPA-SAM Phonetic Fonts

The IPA-SAM fonts are a set of TrueType fonts (not Unicode) suitable for Windows and MacOS that include all current IPA symbols. The keyboard layout is designed to be compatible with SAMPA.

SAMPA–SAM Phonetic Alphabet

SAMPA is a phonetic transcription coding that uses normal ASCII characters as replacements for IPA symbols. It has been designed for phonemic/broad phonetic transcription of European languages.

Spoken Phonetic Transcription

The PHONWEB page provides a facility to read out SAMPA phonetic transcription for English in synthetic speech!