Topic-164: The IPA While discussing the key elements of linguistic phonetic description, we need to consider the International Phonetic Alphabet (abbreviated as IPA. IPA is the set of symbols and diacritics that have been officially approved by IPA. The association publishes a chart comprising of a number of separate charts. At the top inside the front cover, you will find the main consonant chart. Below it is a table showing the symbols for nonpulmonic consonants, and below that is the vowel chart. Inside the back cover is a list of diacritics and other symbols, and a set of symbols for suprasegmental features (events) such as tone, intonation, stress, and length. Remember that the IPA chart does not try to coverall possible types of phonetic descriptions (e.g., all the individual strategies for realizing linguistic phonological contrasts, or gradations in the degree of co-articulation between adjacent segments, etc. Instead, it is limited to those possible sounds that can have linguistic significance in that they can change the meaning of a word in some languages. So the description of IPA is based on the linguistic phonetics of the community.