Welcome to the ol' Interactive IPA!
Note that as of March 2018, the expanded version of this chart is ready for use, but here's the old page for good measure:
Below you can see and hear the whole International Phonetic Alphabet. That is, besides suprasegmentals, tones, and diacritics — and the labiodental flap — but you can hear the latter at the new page. To see the deal with these additional features of the IPA, check this [PDF] out. The cool feature of the charts on this page is that you can click on each character to hear very accurate samples of what it sounds like. Here's how this all works:
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If you click on the top half of a consonant button you'll hear it initially, followed by [a]. |
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If you click on the bottom half of the button you'll hear it medially, both preceded and followed by [a]. |
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If you click on a vowel you'll hear the vowel by itself. |
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Within a column, consonants on the left are voiceless and consonants on the right are voiced. |
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Unrounded vowels have peach buttons. |
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Rounded vowels have blue buttons. |
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Vowels in pairs have the same height and backness and differ only in rounding. |
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Black buttons indicate impossible articulations. |
This page is based on the late, great Peter Ladefoged's similar and very cool page. It's a great resource, but I noticed that his sound samples have a fair number of inaccuracies and I wanted to provide a page that was as accurate as possible, so I recorded all the sounds myself, and here we are. There are other talking charts out there such as this one by Paul Meier which is also good but still has some inaccuracies, mostly in the vowels. Meanwhile, if you wish, take a sec to look at this page that consists of various phonetics issues I think ought to be worked out, and give me some feedback on them if you so desire. Now without further ado, the charts:
