Diacritics are used for phonetic detail. They are added to IPA letters to indicate a modification or specification of that letter's normal pronunciation. By being made superscript, any IPA letter may function as a diacritic, conferring elements of its articulation to the base letter. Various ligatures of pitch/tone letters and diacritics are provided for by the
Kiel Convention and used in the IPA
Handbook despite not being found in the summary of the IPA alphabet found on the one-page chart.
Notes: The old staveless tone letters, which are effectively obsolete, include high , mid [not supported by Unicode], low , rising , falling , low rising and low falling .
Stress Officially, the
stress marks appear before the stressed syllable, and thus mark the syllable boundary as well as stress (though the syllable boundary may still be explicitly marked with a period). In such transcriptions, the stress mark does not mark a syllable boundary. The primary stress mark may be
doubled for extra stress (such as prosodic stress). The secondary stress mark is sometimes seen doubled for extra-weak stress, but this convention has not been adopted by the IPA. for a phrase or intermediate boundary and for a prosodic boundary. For example, C# is a word-final consonant, %V a post-
pausa vowel, and σC a syllable-initial consonant.
Pitch and tone are defined in the
Handbook as "upstep" and "downstep", concepts from tonal languages. However, the upstep symbol can also be used for
pitch reset, and the IPA
Handbook uses it for prosody in the illustration for Portuguese, a non-tonal language. Phonetic pitch and phonemic tone may be indicated by either diacritics placed over the nucleus of the syllablee.g., high-pitch or by
Chao tone letters placed either before or after the word or syllable. There are three graphic variants of the tone letters: with or without a stave, and facing left or facing right from the stave. The stave was introduced with the 1989 Kiel Convention, as was the option of placing a staved letter after the word or syllable, while retaining the older conventions. There are therefore six ways to transcribe pitch/tone in the IPA: i.e., , , , , and for a high pitch/tone. Of the tone letters, only left-facing staved letters and a few representative combinations are shown in the summary on the
Chart, and in practice it is currently more common for tone letters to occur after the syllable/word than before, as in the Chao tradition. Placement before the word is a carry-over from the pre-Kiel IPA convention, as is still the case for the stress and upstep/downstep marks. The IPA endorses the Chao tradition of using the left-facing tone letters, , for underlying tone, and the right-facing letters, , for surface tone, as occurs in
tone sandhi, and for the intonation of non-tonal languages. In the Portuguese illustration in the 1999
Handbook, for example, tone letters are placed before a word or syllable to indicate prosodic pitch (equivalent to global rise and global fall, but allowing more precision), and in the Cantonese illustration they are placed after a word/syllable to indicate lexical tone. Theoretically therefore prosodic pitch and lexical tone could be simultaneously transcribed in a single text, though this is not a formalized distinction. Rising and falling pitch, as in
contour tones, are indicated by combining the pitch diacritics and letters in the table, such as grave plus acute for rising and acute plus grave for falling . Only the six combinations of two diacritics are listed in the IPA chart and
Handbook, across just three basic pitch levels (high, mid, low), despite the doubled diacritics supporting five levels of pitch in isolation. The four other explicitly approved rising and falling diacritic combinations are high/mid rising , low rising , high falling , and low/mid falling . Combinations with double grave and double acute are occasionally encountered in the literature, but apart from grave–double acute are not supported by Unicode. The Chao tone letters, on the other hand, may be combined in any pattern, and are therefore used for more complex contours and finer distinctions than the diacritics allow, such as mid-rising , extra-high falling , etc. There are 20 such possibilities. However, in Chao's original proposal, which was adopted by the IPA in 1989, he stipulated that the half-high and half-low letters may be combined with each other, but not with the other three tone letters, so as not to create spuriously precise distinctions. With this restriction, there are 8 possibilities. The old staveless tone letters tend to be more restricted than the staved letters, though not as restricted as the diacritics. Technically they support as many distinctions as the staved letters, but in the decades prior to the Kiel Convention only three pitch levels were provided for level tones, and only two for contour tones. Unicode supports default or high-pitch and low-pitch . Only one mid-pitch tone is currently supported, the mid-level grave ; the acute equivalent is provisionally assigned in Unicode , while the mid-macron was judged too similar to other hyphen-like symbols to receive encoding. The IPA had also used dots for
neutral tones, but the corresponding dotted Chao tone letters were not adopted at the Kiel Convention. Although tone diacritics and tone letters are presented as equivalent on the chart, "this was done only to simplify the layout of the chart. The two sets of symbols are not comparable in this way." Using diacritics, a high tone is and a low tone is ; in tone letters, these are and . One can double the diacritics for extra-high and extra-low ; there is no parallel to this using tone letters. Instead, tone letters have mid-high and mid-low ; again, there is no equivalent among the diacritics. Thus in a three-register tone system, are equivalent to , while in a four-register system, may be equivalent to . though in practice only generic peaking (rising-falling) and dipping (falling-rising) combinations are used. Chao tone letters are required for finer detail (, etc.). Although only 10 peaking and dipping tones were proposed in Chao's original, limited set of tone letters, phoneticians often make finer distinctions, and indeed an example is found on the IPA Chart. The system allows the transcription of 112 peaking and dipping pitch contours, including tones that are level for part of their length. More complex contours are possible. Chao gave an example of (mid-high-low-mid) from English prosody. This is a productive process, but apart from extra-high and extra-low tones being marked by doubled high- and low-tone diacritics, , the major
prosodic break being marked as a doubled minor break , and a couple other instances, such usage is not enumerated by the IPA. For example, the stress mark may be doubled to indicate an extra degree of stress, such as prosodic stress in English; the stress mark and prosodic-break bar may even tripled, with and for even greater intensity. An example in French, with a single stress mark for normal prosodic stress at the end of each
prosodic unit (marked as a minor prosodic break), and a double stress mark for contrastive/emphatic stress:
. Similarly, a doubled secondary stress mark has been used for tertiary (extra-light) stress, though a proposal to officially adopt this was rejected. In a similar vein, the effectively obsolete staveless tone letters were once doubled for an emphatic rising intonation and an emphatic falling intonation .
Length is commonly extended by repeating the length marks, e.g.
etc. Such usage may be phonetic, as in English
shhh! , or phonemic, as in the "overlong" segments of
Estonian: •
vere 'blood [gen.sg.]',
veere 'edge [gen.sg.]',
veere 'roll [imp. 2nd sg.]' •
lina 'sheet',
linna 'town [gen. sg.]',
linna 'town [ill. sg.]' (Normally additional phonemic degrees of length are handled by the extra-short or half-long diacritic, i.e. or , but the first two words in each of the Estonian examples are analyzed as typically short and long, and , requiring a different remedy for the additional words.)
Delimiters are similar: double slashes indicate extra phonemic (morpho-phonemic), double square brackets especially precise transcription, and double parentheses especially unintelligible. Occasionally other diacritics are doubled: •
Rhoticity, as in
Badaga non-rhotic "mouth", slightly rhotic "bangle", and strongly rhotic "crop". • Mild and strong
aspiration, as in vs . •
Nasalization, as in
Palantla Chinantec lightly nasalized vs heavily nasalized ; in documents from before 2015 some care may be needed to distinguish this from the old
extIPA diacritic for
velopharyngeal frication in disordered speech, , which has also been analyzed as extreme nasalization. • Weak vs strong
ejectives, as in vs . • Especially lowered, such as (or if space is tight) for as a weak fricative in some pronunciations of
register. • Especially retracted, as in or , though some care might be needed to distinguish this from indications of alveolar or alveolarized articulation in
extIPA, e.g. . • Especially advanced, as in , or raised, as in (or if space is tight). • The transcription of
strident and
harsh voice as extra-creaky may be motivated by the similarities of these phonations. The
extIPA provides combining parentheses for weak intensity, which when combined with a doubled diacritic indicate an intermediate degree. For instance, increasing degrees of nasalization of the vowel might be written . ==Brackets and transcription delimiters==