What is ipachart.com?

Updated

ipachart.com is a free, browser-based interactive chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Click any symbol and it plays an audio clip of the sound that symbol represents. It is a reference and listening tool for anyone who needs to connect IPA notation to actual pronunciation — linguistics students, language learners, singers, actors working on accents, or teachers preparing phonetics material.

The site covers vowels, pulmonic consonants, non-pulmonic consonants, affricates, and a set of "other symbols," and it works in any modern browser with HTML5 audio support.

What you can do on the site

The core interaction is simple: choose a symbol, hear the sound. The chart is organized into the standard IPA layout, so you can also read it structurally — for example, seeing which consonants are plosives versus fricatives, or which vowels sit in the close, close-mid, open-mid, and open rows.

The sections on the page are:

  • Vowels — arranged by front/central/back and by height. Where symbols appear in pairs, the one on the right represents a rounded vowel (e.g. i/y, e/ø, ɯ/u).
  • Pulmonic consonants — the main consonant table, organized by place of articulation (bilabial through glottal) and manner (plosive, nasal, trill, tap or flap, fricative, lateral fricative, approximant, lateral approximant). Where symbols appear in pairs, the right-hand one is voiced. Grey-shaded areas mark articulations judged impossible.
  • Non-pulmonic consonants — clicks, voiced implosives, and ejectives, each labeled by place of articulation.
  • Other symbols — a mixed group including ʍ (voiceless labial-velar fricative), ɥ (voiced labial-palatal approximant), ʜ and ʢ (epiglottal fricatives), ʡ (epiglottal plosive), ɕ and ʑ (alveolo-palatal fricatives), ɺ (alveolar lateral flap), and ɧ (simultaneous ʃ and x).
  • Affricates — voiceless and voiced pairs such as t͡s/d͡z, t͡ʃ/d͡ʒ, t͡ɕ/d͡ʑ, and ʈ͡ʂ/ɖ͡ʐ.

How to use it

  1. Open ipachart.com in a current version of any popular browser.
  2. Make sure JavaScript is enabled — the interactive chart will not function without it, and the page shows a notice if it is disabled or unsupported.
  3. Find the symbol you want in the relevant section (vowels, pulmonic consonants, non-pulmonic consonants, other symbols, or affricates).
  4. Click the symbol. You should hear the corresponding sound played through your device's audio.

Expected result: you hear an isolated recording of that phone, which you can replay as many times as you like to compare against a sound you are trying to produce or transcribe.

The main limitation to keep in mind

The site states plainly that the recordings are only a rough guide. Real pronunciation varies a lot by language and by context. The page gives a concrete example: in English, voiceless plosives usually end with a puff of air called aspiration, but the voiceless plosives on this page are not aspirated.

That means the chart is best used to learn the identity and articulatory target of a symbol, not as a model of how that symbol sounds in every language. If you are working on a specific language, treat the chart as a starting point and confirm against recordings of that language.

Practical notes

  • Audio clips on the page are credited to Peter Isotalo, User:Denelson83, and the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive.
  • The page does not describe any account, login, or payment requirement, so the chart is presented as directly usable in the browser.
  • If you hear nothing when clicking, check JavaScript status first, then browser audio permissions and output volume — those are the two most common reasons the interaction fails.