 When I want to talk about different sounds, I'll talk about things like the aah sound and bat, or the shh sound and shoe, and other people will say similar things when talking about linguistics to people who don't have an extensive background in linguistics, but stray far from this cozy haven for the casual enthusiast into the world of academic journals and professional linguistics and you'll start running into stuff like this. Weird Greek letters, upside down letters, letters with funny little tails, diacritics, brackets, slashes, what is this madness? This, my friends, is the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, and it was created by the International Phonetic Association, or IPA. Given that both of them were named by people who study language for a living, I can only assume that this is some sort of cruel joke designed to make them both intentionally purposefully ambiguous. But anyway, IPA the alphabet was born out of a very simple need, the need for linguists to easily communicate to each other what sounds they're talking about without relying on ancient writing systems with weird spelling rules that obscure the actual pronunciation happening beneath it all. The whole thing started back in Paris in 1886 with a small group of English teachers who called themselves the Phonetic Teachers Association. They were mostly concerned with the fact that English and French both had a lot of really weird spelling rules, so when you were trying to teach English to French kids, you had to simultaneously teach them a bunch of new sounds and ways of pronouncing things and a bunch of new spelling conventions. They decided that doing that would be way, way easier if there was a system for writing stuff down exactly the way it's pronounced, so you can show your students how something is pronounced instead of just saying it to them and hoping they get the idea. But this wasn't actually the beginning of the International Phonetic Alphabet, at first these teachers actually made up two different writing systems, one for French and one for English. Despite that, it wasn't long before linguists from all over the world, or you know Europe at least, took an interest in what these Parisian teachers were doing, for pretty obvious reasons. The world of linguistics before IPA wasn't pretty. It was a cold, dark time, when linguists who spoke different languages with different sounds had no idea what anyone else was talking about, when every book or paper on anything had to make up its own system for writing down the particular sounds it wanted to talk about, when the only way to make absolutely clear what you were saying was to launch into an anatomical description of exactly what people were doing with their mouths. The winters were 15 months long, fire rained from the sky, blood ran in the streets, it was madness! Yeah, okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but membership in this group really did shoot up immediately after it was founded, suggesting that linguists really did find the idea pretty useful. In 1887, only one year after the group was founded, they decided that having a different phonetic writing system for each language was done. So they created the original version of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and it was awesome! Now, you could write anything from any language and make it absolutely clear to people how it was pronounced, as long as if by any language you mean English, French, or German. Yeah, the alphabet still had a long way to go at this point. Still though, that this first draft could accurately be used for even more than one language was a pretty huge step forward, and since then they've only added more and more symbols so it can be used for more and more languages. In 1888, the group published a declaration of purpose and a set of six rules for how the alphabet should be expanded from then on. One, there should be a separate symbol for each sound. Two, when the same sound, or slightly different shades of the same sound, is used in different languages, the same symbol should always be used. These first two rules get into the issue of what counts as a completely different sound and what counts as variations of the same sound, a huge issue which probably deserves its own video, but for now I'll just say that they make it very clear that two things are different sounds when and only when there is some language somewhere in the world that differentiates between different words using only differences in those two sounds. Three, the alphabet should be made up of normal letters from the Roman alphabet with as few new additions as possible. The main reason they made this rule was because when you publish a paper, you have to actually make copies of that paper, with like a printing press that uses physical pieces of wood or metal or whatever shaped like letters and covered in ink. And making completely new hardware for all these new symbols you're coming up with was way, way more expensive in the 1880s than it is today. It's much, much easier to just take a block you already have and turn it upside down or add a little notch to it or something. Four, new letters should be suggestive of the sound they represent. Usually, this meant writing new sounds with symbols based on letters from the Latin alphabet that make sounds similar to the new sound. But not always. For instance, at one point they actually designated a flipped question markish thingy to refer to voiced pharyngeal fricatives because they thought it kind of looked like the Arabic letter, fine, which makes that sound. The last rule, number five, basically says try not to use diacritics. This being small marks you put around a letter to alter what it means. Early on, the International Phonetic Association did everything they could to avoid using diacritics. They really, really wanted new letters for new sounds, not old letters with new markings around them for new sounds. But as they started to run out of letters to flip around and click tails onto, they eventually gave in and started using diacritics more and more. This was especially the case when people would discover some new language that hit two or three sets of every sound based on some small difference. When faced with a choice between adding one or two more diacritics to distinguish between the two sets, or doubling or tripling the number of letters in the entire alphabet, they tended to choose the former. That's all the rules for how they decided to expand the alphabet, but there's one more important thing to talk about, and that's the fact that there's actually two different ways IPA can be used. Narrow transcription, where you put what you're writing between brackets, and broad transcription, where you put it between slashes. I'm gonna use aspiration as an example to explain the difference. I've brought up aspiration before, but without getting too much into it, basically, when you aspirate a sound, you say it with a little puff of air after it. For most English speakers, it's really hard to tell whether a sound is aspirated or not. We tend to go back and forth between aspirating things and not aspirating them automatically without thinking about it depending on the context. But in some languages, they actually differentiate between words depending on whether they aspirate the sounds or not, like in Thai, where kai with an unaspirated k means chicken, but kai with an aspirated k means egg. So does the fact that there are two different sounds in Thai mean that we have to start writing them as two different sounds in English? It depends on whether you're using narrow transcription or broad transcription. For narrow transcription, the one with the brackets, the answer is a definitive yes. If two things are different sounds in any language anywhere, you have to write them as different sounds everywhere. The goal of narrow transcription is to give the maximum possible amount of information about exactly how people are pronouncing things. But in broad transcription, the one with the slashes, the answer is no. You don't have to write them differently. In broad transcription, you just have to specify which sounds people are using of the sounds that exist and that people think of as different sounds in the language you're talking about. You can even use symbols for sounds that don't technically exist in the language you're talking about, as long as it's close to a sound that does exist. For instance, the English R sound is a little bit different from the R sounds in most other languages, so the symbol that represents it is this thing, while the normal R symbol is used for a rolled R sound instead. But say you don't have an upside down R symbol on your keyboard. No problem. As long as you're talking about English and using broad transcription, you can just use a normal letter R and we'll get what you're talking about. So yeah, after all these rules were put in place, this group made it their job to constantly expand the international phonetic alphabet as more and more languages were formally described and as more sounds were discovered. And they renamed themselves several times before they eventually landed on their current name, Thomas Hopkins Galaudet. Sorry, reference to an earlier video point is I can't say French stuff, but in English, it means International Phonetic Association. Today, the alphabet is huge. It has way, way more symbols than any language anywhere in the world could possibly have sounds, but each symbol does represent something that's a unique sound for some language in the world. And besides, the huge number of symbols makes it really, really easy for linguists to get across exactly what they mean. So being able to read IPA has become pretty much required for anyone interested in linguistics. I mean, you can still learn a fair amount about linguistics without knowing it, but it's a little bit like trying to learn physics without knowing calculus. There's a definite limit on how far you can get. I don't actually know the whole thing by heart and I'm not even really sure how common it is for real linguists to have memorized the whole thing. But what I've done and what I recommend for other amateur linguistics enthusiasts is to just learn what you need as you go. The whole thing is enormous, so just start with memorizing the symbols for whatever language or languages you can already speak, and then learn the symbols for whatever languages you happen to be interested in at the moment. As your interests shift over time, you'll get a decent overview of the more common parts of IPA, and you can just look up the parts you don't know as you run into them. Or, you know, you can always just keep watching my videos instead. I make sure to never use IPA so that people who don't know it can still follow along. So professional linguist or random person who thinks the stuff I talk about is interesting. I hope you stick around for more on my linguistics videos.