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Understanding the Phonetic Alphabet
What is the phonetic alphabet?
Phonetic transcription is a system in which one symbol is used to represent one sound.
English writing does not usually consistently use one symbol (or letter) to represent one
sound. For example:
As you can see, English uses various letters to represent the sound. Phonetic
transcription, however, uses the same symbol for the same sound.
When we talk about English spelling, each unit is called a letter. When we talk about
phonetic transcription, each unit is called a symbol. Phonetic transcription is written
using slashes, like this:
When we use English spelling to talk about words, words are written like this to avoid
confusion (so we know that we are not using transcription):
I want a vacation
Why is phonetic transcription useful?
Phonetic transcription is useful because English spelling does a poor job of showing how
words are pronounced.
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