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Download IPA chart

Page history last edited by John Jordan 10 years, 1 month ago

Download a table of IPA codes

 

Here is a file you can download that has a table showing the IPA characters and the Unicode numbers assigned to each character.

 

The document is created with the Junicode font, so it will not display properly on your computer if you have not yet installed Junicode. To do so go to Cool free IPA fonts to download to get the font, and go to How to install fonts on your computer for instructions on how to install it.

 

The document is in Rich Text Format (RTF). RTF is a word processor format designed by Microsoft way, way, way back in the very early days of Windows (like 20 years ago or something). It is an open standard that was designed to be a "lingua franca" format so that all word processors could open. But since all word processors do things slightly differently the RTF format was designed to support only basic text formatting. For example, RTF files cannot handle footnotes, text frames, and other fancy stuff. On the other hand, RTF does support text styles, fonts and font attributes, and tables. That is all we need here, so we decided that RTF is the best choice. You can simply open the file in Word, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice Writer, Abiword, KWord, WordPerfect, and just about any version thereof.

 

Just in case your word processor pukes it up, we have also provided a PDF version of the file.

 

How to use the file

The neat thing about having the codes in a table is that you can select the entire table or any individual column if you want. The table in the RTF file was created with Junicode, but suppose you suddenly discover a new font that you love and you wonder if it has all the IPA characters you need. No problem! Just install the new font, then select the left column in the table (let your mouse hover over the top of the column and the mouse pointer will turn to an arrow pointing at the column). With the whole column selected just apply the new font to it. Now scroll down the table looking for "holes" in the first column. If there is a hole that means that the new font does not contain that character.

 

Here is another neat trick that you can do. Most linguists don't need every single IPA character every single day. In fact, most of us use only 20-30 IPA characters regularly. So just copy and paste the rows containing the characters you need all the time into a new table. Then in your new table delete the columns leaving just the column with the character and the column with the code for your OS (decimal or hex). Squeeze the formatting so you can print this out as a skinny strip of paper and tape it to the side of your monitor. Now you have a handy personal IPA cheat sheet.

 

One more comment about the file: IPA characters appear in a megazillion ways. Just think of all the possible combinations of diacritics with the characters. So we decided to include the most common characters only, and for the combining diacriticals we just used one or two letters to show how the diacritical appears on the letter. If you discover you need something that is not in our table, just do "Insert Row" in your word processor and add the character.

 

Wait ... one more comment about the file: We arranged the rows in sort of alphabetical order. This makes it easier when you need to look up a character in the table. But our decision about what "sort of alphabetical" means may not be yours. We thought the eth belonged after the d, but if you want it next to the theta, just move the row to wherever makes sense to you.

 

Download the RTF or PDF file

 

Download the RTF file        Download the PDF file

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