History of the International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet was created soon after the International Phonetic Association was established in the late 19th century. It was intended as an international system of phonetic transcription for oral languages, originally for pedagogical purposes. The Association was established in Paris in 1886 by French and British language teachers led by Paul Passy. The prototype of the alphabet appeared in Phonetic Teachers' Association (1888b). The Association based their alphabet upon the Romic alphabet of Henry Sweet, which in turn was based on the Phonotypic Alphabet of Isaac Pitman and the Palæotype of Alexander John Ellis. The alphabet has undergone a number of revisions during its history, the most significant being the one put forth at the Kiel Convention in 1989. Changes to the alphabet are proposed and discussed in the Association's organ, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, previously known as Le Maître Phonétique and before that as The Phonetic Teacher, and then put to a vote by the Association's Council. The extensions to the IPA for disordered speech were created in 1990, with a major revision in 2015.

Early alphabets The International Phonetic Association was founded in Paris in 1886 under the name Dhi Fonètik Tîtcerz' Asóciécon (The Phonetic Teachers' Association), a development of L'Association phonétique des professeurs d'Anglais ("The English Teachers' Phonetic Association"), to promote an international phonetic alphabet, designed primarily for English, French, and German, for use in schools to facilitate acquiring foreign pronunciation. Originally the letters had different phonetic values from language to language. For example, English [ʃ] was transcribed with ⟨c⟩ and French [ʃ] with ⟨x⟩. As of May and November 1887, the alphabets were as follows:

1888 alphabet In the August–September 1888 issue of its journal, the Phonetic Teachers' Association published a standardized alphabet intended for transcription of multiple languages, reflecting its members' consensus that only one set of alphabet ought to be used for all languages, along with a set of six principles:

There should be a separate sign for each distinctive sound; that is, for each sound which, being used instead of another, in the same language, can change the meaning of a word. When any sound is found in several languages, the same sign should be used in all. This applies also to very similar shades of sound. The alphabet should consist as much as possible of the ordinary letters of the roman alphabet; as few new letters as possible being used. In assigning values to the roman letters, international usage should decide. The new letters should be suggestive of the sounds they represent, by their resemblance to the old ones. Diacritic marks should be avoided, being trying for the eyes and troublesome to write.

The principles would govern all future development of the alphabet, with the exception of #5 and in some cases #2, until they were revised drastically in 1989. #6 has also been loosened, as diacritics have been admitted for limited purposes. The devised alphabet was as follows. The letters marked with an asterisk were "provisional shapes", which were meant to be replaced "when circumstances will allow".

1899 Viëtor alphabet

Although not published by the PTA/IPA, the (possibly mutual) influence of the Viëtor alphabet of 1899 on the development of the IPA alphabet is clear.

The triangular colons for length were already in use: Long: aː, half-long: aˑ, non-syllabic: ă, stressed: ʹa, nasal: ã.

1900 IPA chart During the 1890s, the alphabet was expanded to cover sounds of Arabic and other non-European languages which did not easily fit the Latin alphabet. Throughout the first half of the 1900s, the Association published a series of booklets outlining the specifications of the alphabet in several languages, the first being a French edition published in 1900. In the book, the chart appeared as follows:

Initially, the charts were arranged with laryngeal sounds on the left and labial ones on the right, following the convention of Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech. Vowels and consonants were placed in a single chart, reflecting how sounds ranged in openness from stops (top) to open vowels (bottom). The voiced velar fricative was represented by ⟨⟩ (distinct from ⟨ɡ⟩, which represents a plosive) since 1895 until it was replaced by ⟨ǥ⟩ in 1900. ⟨ǥ⟩ too would be replaced by ⟨ɣ⟩ in 1931. Not all letters, especially those in the fricatives row which included both fricatives in the modern sense and approximants, were self-explanatory and could only be discerned in the notes following the chart, which redefined letters using the orthographies of languages wherein the sounds they represent occur. For example:

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