![]() | Below are answers to frequently asked questions about the corresponding page Help:IPA. They address concerns, questions, and misconceptions which have repeatedly arisen on the talk page. Please feel free to change this material in light of new discussion. |
![]() | This page is transcluded onto Help talk:IPA/English/FAQ. |
For English words, Wikipedia does use a "normal" pronunciation key. It is Help:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be used in addition to the IPA, enclosed in the {{respell}} template. See the opening sentences of Beijing, Cochineal, and Lepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example, cum laude would be respelled kuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread as koom-LOH-day. English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it.
Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion.