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Phoneticians have long recognized the scientific necessity of distinguishing the sounds of words from their written representations. The acclaimed twentieth‐century phonetician Peter Ladefoged (2001) estimated that the world's languages have about 600 different CONSONANTS and 200 VOWELS. Each language draws a small subset from this larger pool. English, for instance, has roughly 35–38 PHONES in total, depending on dialect. That's not an especially large number; Ubykh, an extinct language of the Caucasus, had about twice as many (Colarusso, 2014). Nonetheless, the fact that our alphabet has only 26 letters means that it can't represent all the distinctions English speakers use. To maintain a clear difference between sound and spelling, speech research and technology rely extensively on systematic phonetic alphabets, the most famous of which is the INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET ( IPA ).

Table 3.1 Examples of Monkey in Different Writing Systems

Orthographic System	Language	Example Word (“Monkey”)	IPA
Roman	Spanish	mono	[ˈmono]
Cyrillic	Russian	обезьяна	[ɐbʲɪˈzʲjanə]
Hangul	Korean		[ˈwɘːnsʰuŋi]
Kanji	Japanese		[saɾɯ]

Figure 3.1 Examples of one‐to‐many (left) and many‐to‐one (right) spelling‐to‐sound correspondences

Let's identify some of the reasons why phonetic alphabets are essential:

1 They associate one unique symbol with each different sound used in spoken language.When analyzing pronunciation, one thing we certainly can't tolerate is ambiguity in the way we represent individual phones on the printed page or computer screen. In terms of spelling‐to‐sound correspondences, English orthography has two general kinds of drawbacks, as shown in Figure 3.1. First, it has numerous one‐to‐many relationships, in which a single letter can correspond to multiple phones. For instance, the letter “a” can represent the different vowel sounds in cat (/æ/), Kate (/eɪ/), and any (/ɛ/). Second, it also has numerous many‐to‐one relationships, where a particular phone is spelled in more than one way. For example, the first sound in she, /ʃ/, is spelled with “sh,” but the same sound in sure is written with “s”, and in nation is written with “t.” English spelling therefore lacks the precision needed for a scientific tool.

2  They can represent the sounds of languages that have no orthography.When European anthropologists first interacted with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, they needed a phonetic alphabet in order to document scores of unwritten languages. That need still exists because languages previously unknown to scholars continue to be identified in the twenty‐first century, such as Pirahã (Brazil), Koro (India), and Light Warlpiri (Australia)—all discovered within the last decade or so.

3 They can represent the sounds of languages that have a written MODALITY but do not use an alphabetic orthography.A number of languages, including the many varieties of Chinese, have writing systems that generally do not indicate pronunciation. A phonetic alphabet allows us to represent the sounds of these languages systematically and unambiguously.

4 They can represent sounds in the same way for all languages.The pronunciation of the Spanish word sí, meaning yes, is very close to that of English see. Notice, however, the difference in the spelling of the vowel sound. By using a single phonetic symbol /i/ for both Spanish and English, we can capture the fact that the two languages have nearly the same vowel despite the orthographic difference.

5 They can systematically represent sound distinctions that are not reliably indicated in the standard orthography of alphabetic languages.English spelling does not distinguish the first sound of thin (/θ/) from the first sound of this (/ð/). Though both are spelled th, if you produce them in isolation you will feel and hear a clear difference. This is due to the presence of vocal fold vibration in the /ð/ of this but not in the /θ/ of thin. Using separate phonetic symbols captures this important distinction.