IPA Charts with Audio

• The charts are ordered roughly from most common sounds to most obscure: common consonant manners, vowels, nasal vowels, rarer consonant manners, and clicks.
• Each consonant character has four (where possible) associated sound files:
  • top left is the sound by itself
  • top right is the sound followed by [a]
  • bottom left is the sound preceded by [a]
  • bottom right is the sound preceded and followed by [a]
• Each vowel character is pronounced on its own.
• Within a consonant column, the left-hand character of a pair is voiceless, the right-hand one is voiced (where possible).
• Within a vowel column, the left-hand character of a pair (white background) is unrounded, the right-hand one (light gray background) is rounded.
• Areas of darker gray represent silent or impossible articulations.
• By request, I’ve added a control to switch the charts’ behavior, labeled “Chart Mode.” The default “Playable sounds” mode provides the standard behavior. The “Selectable symbols” mode deactivates the audio links so that you can select and copy the symbols in the charts for use elsewhere. (Note: in “Selectable symbols” mode, on smaller screens / narrow browser windows, there may be some extra vertical space around the symbols that will still play the sounds if clicked on.)

• Not necessarily all of these sounds are attested in language! Rather, I wanted to cover the space of possible articulations to a reasonable degree, partly to demonstrate the amazing diversity of speech sounds.
• Conversely, there’s at least one large class of sounds that I’ve skipped almost entirely, which is coarticulated ones, such as the emphatic coronal consonants of Arabic. To try to be complete about coarticulations would balloon the number of places to 100 or more, so I decided to keep away from them except for rounded velars (and arguably all the clicks).
• Similarly, sibilants are less fine-grained than they could be, e.g. apical vs. laminal at each place.
• A few of the spellings may be non-canonical, so probably don’t use this as a final authority on IPA spellings — check other sources too.
  • The “low uvular” place of articulation probably deserves a special mention. This is a category of my own invention, but I think it's justifiable. It comprises sounds similar to the back component of English “dark L,” which is usually considered to be velarized, but in my view is actually clearly uvularized, and lower in the throat than most other uvular sounds, closer to a pharyngeal articulation. However, it still involves the uvula and has different formants from pharyngeal sounds (and also very clearly different from velar sounds). I find that I can produce the uvularization of dark L by pronouncing [ʌ] (i.e. an unrounded version of open "o") and retracting my tongue from there. Hence I have used a superscript ʌ with uvular characters to denote low uvular articulation. A nice coincidence is that ʌ looks like a small-caps lambda and thus recalls the connection to dark L.
• In any case, I would hazard a guess that these pronunciations are the most accurate available online that have been produced by a single speaker — with luck even more accurate than the old charts! I may periodically listen through these sounds and re-record any that don’t seem accurate enough.

2025-02-01

• [Ɂʰ] has lacked sound file links. I’ve updated its links to play the same sounds as for [Ɂh], since in this case they’re basically the same. That may have been my original intention and I just forgot!
• 'm̪' corrected to 'ɱ', and Greek 'φ' (which has the more cursive form in the chart typeface, SIL Gentium Plus) to Latin 'ɸ' (which has the circle-and-pipe form that’s correct for IPA) thanks to helpful user feedback.
• Just above the charts is a link to my newly created Ko-fi donation page. Any donation amount is much appreciated!
• Reorganized the page intro, including creating this changelog.

2024-10-15

• Sounds should now play in the audio player across browsers. Previously, at least recently, Firefox would download the audio files when clicking a sound link, rather than playing it.
• New chart mode control added. See the Pointers section above for details.

2018-03

After years of lying fallow in a partially-built state, the charts are now complete (minus a few sound errors I need to fix) and ready for your use and enjoyment! As you’ll see, they’re pretty exhaustive, though by no means totally so.

2011-02

In case you miss them, the old charts have been restored to working order.