The NATO phonetic alphabet, officially the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, is an internationally recognized set of names for the letters of the Latin alphabet and the Arabic digits. It is most commonly used in radio communication, where the usual names of the letters are likely to be misheard. It was defined in 1955–1956 by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
Usage "Spelling alphabets" are used to distinguish letters when spelling out words. The alphabet is designed to minimize potential confusion, as radio and telephonic communication can be subject to static or other interference. For example, the message "proceed to map grid DH98" would be read out as "proceed to map grid Delta-Hotel-Niner-Eight". Although such codes are commonly called "phonetic alphabets", they are not phonetic in the sense of phonetic transcription systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet, nor are they alphabets used to write out messages, but rather clearer names for the letters of an alphabet. Civilian industry uses the code words to avoid similar problems in the transmission of messages by telephone systems. For example, it is often used in the retail industry, where customer or site details are conveyed by telephone (e.g., to authorize a credit agreement or confirm stock codes), though ad hoc code words are often used in that instance. It has been used by information technology workers to communicate, by voice, very long serial numbers and reference codes. Most major airlines use the alphabet to communicate passenger name records (PNRs) internally, and in some cases, with customers. It is often used in a medical context as well. The 26 code words are as follows (ICAO spellings): Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, Xray, Yankee, and Zulu. ⟨Alfa⟩ and ⟨Juliett⟩ are spelled that way to avoid mispronunciation by people unfamiliar with English orthography; NATO changed ⟨X-ray⟩ to ⟨Xray⟩ for the same reason. The code words for digits are their English names, though with their pronunciations modified in the cases of three, four, five, nine, and thousand. Several codes words and sequences of code words have become well-known, such as Bravo Zulu (letter code BZ) for "well done", Checkpoint Charlie (Checkpoint C) in Berlin, and Zulu Time for Greenwich Mean Time or Coordinated Universal Time. During the Vietnam War, the US government referred to the Viet Cong guerrillas and the group itself as VC, or Victor Charlie; the name "Charlie" became synonymous with this force.
Pronunciation of code words
Design
To create the code, a series of international agencies assigned 26 clear-code words (also known as "phonetic words") acrophonically to the letters of the Latin alphabet, with the goal that the letters and numbers would be easily distinguishable from one another over radio and telephone. The words were chosen to be accessible to speakers of English, French and Spanish. Some of the code words were changed over time, as they were found to be ineffective in real-life conditions. The final choice of code words for the letters of the alphabet and for the digits was made after hundreds of thousands of comprehension tests involving 31 nationalities. The qualifying feature was the likelihood of a code word being understood in the context of others. For example, Football has a higher chance of being understood than Foxtrot in isolation, but Foxtrot is more often understood when combined with other words in the spelling alphabet. Pronunciations were set out by the ICAO before 1956 with advice from the governments of both the United States and United Kingdom. To eliminate national variations in pronunciation, posters illustrating the pronunciation desired by ICAO are available. However, there remain differences in the pronunciations published by ICAO and other agencies, and ICAO has apparently conflicting Latin-alphabet and IPA transcriptions. At least some of these differences appear to be typographic errors. In 2022, the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) attempted to resolve these conflicts. For example, they consistently transcribe [a] for what the ICAO had transcribed variously as [a], [aː], [ɑ], [ɑː], [æ], [ə] in IPA and as a, ah, ar, er in orthography. In the official version of the alphabet, two spellings deviate from the English norm: Alfa and Juliett. Alfa is spelled with an f as it is in most European languages because the spelling Alpha may not be pronounced properly by native speakers of some languages – who may not know that ph should be pronounced as f. The spelling Juliett is used rather than Juliet for the benefit of French speakers, because they may otherwise treat a single final t as silent. For similar reasons, Charlie and Uniform have recognized alternative pronunciations where the ch is pronounced "sh" and the u is pronounced "oo", though these are not present on the NATO chart. Early on, the NATO alliance changed X-ray to Xray in its version of the alphabet to ensure that it would be pronounced as one word rather than as two, while the global organization ICAO keeps the spelling X-ray.
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