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Below is a basic key to the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. For the smaller set of symbols that is sufficient for English, see Help:IPA for English. Several rare IPA symbols are not included; these are found on the main IPA article.

For each IPA symbol, an English example is given where possible; here "RP" stands for Received Pronunciation. The foreign languages that are used to illustrate additional sounds are primarily the ones most likely to be familiar to English speakers, French, German, and Spanish. For symbols not covered by those, recourse is taken to the populous languages Mandarin Chinese, Hindustani, Arabic, and Russian. For sounds still not covered, other smaller but well-known languages are used, such as Swahili, Turkish, and Zulu.

The left-hand column displays the symbols like this: . Click on the speaker icon to hear the sound; click on the symbol itself for a dedicated article with a more complete description and examples from multiple languages. All the sounds are spoken more than once, and the consonant sounds are spoken once followed by a vowel and once between vowels.

Main symbols

The symbols are arranged by similarity to letters of the Latin alphabet. Symbols which do not resemble any letter are placed at the end.

• These symbols are officially written with a tie linking them (e.g. ), and are also sometimes written as single characters (e.g. ) though the latter convention is no longer official. They are written without ligatures here to ensure correct display in all browsers.

Diacritic marks

All diacritics are here shown on a carrier letter such as the vowel a.

Brackets

Two types of brackets are commonly used to enclose transcriptions in the IPA:

• [Square brackets] indicate the phonetic details of the pronunciation, regardless of whether they are actually meaningful to a native speaker. This is what a foreigner who does not know the structure of a language might hear. For instance, the English word lulls is pronounced , with different el sounds at the beginning and end. This may be obvious to speakers of other languages, though a native English speaker might not believe it. Likewise, Spanish la bomba has two different b sounds to foreign ears, , though a Spaniard might not be able to hear it. Omitting such detail does not make any difference to the identity of the word.
• /Slashes/ indicate meaningful sounds called phonemes. Changing the symbols between slashes would either change the identity of the word or produce nonsense. Since there is no meaningful difference between the two el sounds in the word lulls, they need to be transcribed with the same symbol: . Similarly, Spanish la bomba is transcribed phonemically with a single b sound, . Thus a reader who is not familiar with the language in question might not know how to interpret these transcriptions.

A third kind of bracket is occasionally seen:

• Either //double slashes// or |pipes| (or occasionally other conventions) show that the enclosed sounds are theoretical constructs that aren't actually heard. (This is part of morphophonology.) For instance, most phonologists argue that that the -s at the ends of verbs, which surfaces as either in talks or as in lulls , has a single underlying form. If they decide this form is an s, they would write it //s// (or |s|) to claim that phonemic and are essentially and underneath. If they were to decide it was essentially the latter, //z//, they would transcribe these words and .

Lastly,

• <Angle brackets> may be used to represent the original orthography: <lulls>, <la bomba>.

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