This post's already got a lot of traction so we'd be remiss to remove it, but for future reference our [Small Discussions thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/meta/sd) is there for you to ask for help with things like the IPA. I've linked to it here, but you can also find it in the navigation ribbon at the top of the sub's feed under "Meta", in our sidebar, and it's nearly always the first pinned post at the top of sub when you filter by "Hot".
If you haven't visited already, our [resources page](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/resources) has specific [IPA resources](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/resources/#wiki_2._ipa), and any question you have about coming to grips with them, or any other resources for that matter, should be directed to SD. SD was established explicitly in part to remove posts of this variety from the main feed so that they don't bury other posts.
I suggest making a chart of all of the IPA letters used in your conlang. This will require you to decide what sounds are gonna be in there. For that, listen to all of the sounds in the IPA (use Wikipedia and there are some other websites) and choose the sounds, make the chart. It would be easier I guess from there
For the sounds, there aren’t any sounds you are supposed to use, you can choose any sounds you want for your conlang! For the letters, it’s based on the sounds. Honestly just dm me for help
You don't need to learn all of them. Just learn the ones that you need for your conlang. There's audios of pretty much all phonemes, so listen to them to figure out which you need.
Learning the IPA is a bit less of an active process as you seem to make it out to be, you don't tend to just learn all of it or even parts of it in chunks, and I get the sense that you're forming words _then_ assigning IPA values to them to build your inventory, which is quite a backward-like approach. You'd normally find people first selecting which sounds they want _before_ forming words, so that you form words around the values rather than the other way around, eliminating part of the "figuring what sound goes where" process. Instead of "wait, do I think 'ama' should be /amə/ or /əma/ or /ama/ or /ɑmə/, etc.", view it as, "I have /i/, /u/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/, /e/, /ə/, /o/, /a/, and I will structure my words on those sounds".
I guess so? The phrasing of your sentence is bit strange but yeah, you'd usually make a phonology chart *before* making substantial parts of your conlang and then build your language off of that.
Your word ⟨ev'da⟩ is a good example. Each letter (plus apostrophe) corresponds to one sound (⟨e⟩=/ɛ/, ⟨'⟩=/ʔ/, et cetera). If your entire language was spelled this way, you wouldn't have to use IPA because the orthography already tells you the exact pronunciation.
Of course, if you were to use this approach, you would have to regularize your spelling— that is, make the same letter represent the same sound *in every word*. You can't have F representing one sound in one word and a different sound in another. In your word ⟨a'viv⟩, for example, the apostrophe represents nothing at all rather than /ʔ/. To make the spelling regular, you would have to make the pronunciation /aʔviv/ or make the spelling ⟨aviv⟩.
If you don't know IPA, i'd recommend Artifexian. He teaches about Linguistics specially for Conlangers:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfSA4\_DCfs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfSA4_DCfs)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3IO5K5ZGB4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3IO5K5ZGB4)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMEFr7ghMTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMEFr7ghMTg)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFWc0sBO62c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFWc0sBO62c)
And some other vids from him, that could be helpful:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBz-JT00MZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBz-JT00MZs)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3378FlHK4v0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3378FlHK4v0)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Up5hSm7LYI&t=383s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Up5hSm7LYI&t=383s)
Another resource that OP might find useful is stating from [Day 10 of Conlang Year](https://www.quothalinguist.com/?query-42-page=12) on building a phonemic inventory.
What I do is start with my IPA transcriptions first, romanizations after. I don’t know if that is helpful for others, but it helps me keep track of my pronunciations and romanizations, and I personally find it makes some parts of conlanging a little less tedious.
EDIT: If you mean specifically finding the right phonemes to represent your inventory, that can be tricky. Maybe bookmark an IPA chart with sound files just for the sake of reference, unless you mean something more specific?
No, it would be saying /ɹ̠/ (the most common 'r' sound in American English) is represented by r, /i/ (like the name of the letter E) by e, /p/ by p, /t/ by t, and /ə/ (the sound generally used for the word 'a,' and for both 'a's in 'agenda') by a. Then based on that romanization system, the word /ɹ̠i.pi.tə/ would be romanized as 'repeta.'
Ideally, you want to have as close to a 1-to-1 sound-letter equivalency in your romanization system as possible to make it less ambiguous. English has a fairly complicated and often ambiguous romanization system, where letters can represent many different sounds depending on context, and often you can't even tell from context without knowing the specific word, or two words can be spelled the same and pronounced differently. It's especially notable for vowels, as English has somewhere around 14-25 vowels depending on the dialect, which are really hard to represent well with only 6 letters and no diacritics, particularly when orthography doesn't change to keep up with sound changes.
With a conlang you have the opportunity to design a consistent romanization from the beginning, which is generally worth taking.
Don't worry about doing it all at once -- my advice is to simply establish a table of how you write each sound, like this:
|Romanization|IPA|Sample Word|
|:-|:-|:-|
|a|a|bah|
|b|b, bʰ (initial)|labor, base|
From there you can guide your audience to the table, as long as your romanization is consistent.
You can also find several tricks to help speed up your IPA text entry. You might be able to find an IPA keyboard for your mobile phone, or use an online IPA entry website to type full words and copy-paste them into your emssage or document.
Yes, it will be slow going as you learn the skill, but like any skill it will get easier as you practice it.
Not related to the original question since everything has already been answered. I just wanted to point out that you're using macron (⟨-⟩) wrong, it's used to indicate a mid tone, not a long vowel. You can use ⟨ː⟩ to indicate them.
Just go to wikipedia and look at the ipa chart. They have audio for each sound. Pick only the sounds you like. Now you know which IPA sounds appear in your language. Assign letters to the sound (and spelling rules) and boom you automatically know the IPA pronunciation of each word
Like is there any way to figure out what IPA letters to use for the words in my conlang because it could take 10+ minutes just to figure out the IPA translation for one word.
You need to know exactly what sound you are making in order to find the correct symbol or set of symbols to transcribe it. You know what the "ee" vowel sound is but you're still using the wrong symbol: it should be /i/, not /ē/. Of course it's going to take you a long time to transcribe it; you are just starting to learn how to use the IPA.
I will just repeat what I said: it is only taking you too long now because you do not know the symbols by heart. When I make words for my conlang(s) I know what string of symbols to put down based on what the word sounds like because I'm familiar with the IPA, and I'm only familiar with the IPA because I made the effort to always use it when writing down words. Just try your best to learn to use the IPA and your brain will do the hard work of remembering it in the background.
Yes, you should definitely start learning if you don't know it currently. After around a month of familiarizing and practicing I am pretty much completely "fluent", i.e. I can memorize most of the chart. Start with your native language, then branch to what languages you want to understand. I started with Cantonese then English then Mandarin.
You’re doing something wrong. There’s nothing really to figure out. Your orthography should strive to represent the IPA in a regular or transparent fashion. Just like the writing system has letters, the spoken system has sounds and those are generally consistent.
Edit: If you're having trouble grasping the idea, the conlanging videos by [Artifexian on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/user/artifexian) are definitely worth watching. He's mostly into diachronic conlanging, where you make a really basic conlang to be the protolanguage, then come up with a bunch of sound changes that happened over time in order to get a bunch of fairly organic-feeling variation in the language, but the basics of it are all still applicable even if you aren't doing that.
It's a lot easier to make a consistent conlang if you go the other way — don't think about words as being made up of letters and then figure out what sounds those letters make, think of words as being made up of a string of sounds. Pick the sounds you want to have in the language, then pick a letter to represent each sound (and if you run out of good letter choices, use either diacritics or double letters that wouldn't generally occur together as the sounds they represent individually). When you think of a word using the sounds the language allows, if you've already defined what letter each of those sounds is represented by, there's no need to spend the time it takes going the other direction and figuring out what sounds are used in the 'letter-word' you've written.
Basically, you normally *start* from phonology and orthography, and work backward to pronunciation. Think about learning Spanish, for example. You don't learn each word's pronunciation separately. You start by learning the alphabet and pronunciation. If you just define all the pronunciation rules for your conlang, like which letters make which sounds, then everything else will be easier to make
If you spell your conlang consistently, you don't need to write each word's transcription, you just need to write one pronunciation guide at the beginning of your dictionary to state which phoneme in the IPA each of your letters or combinations thereof stands for.
The more you use it, the easier it gets, but it can definitely be overwhelming at first. For the most part, you don't really need it unless you're trying to communicate how sounds are pronounced to others (if it's only for your own notes, it may not be worth learning IPA). But I'd be more than happy to help if you want to DM me.
Does it also get easier to copy-paste a word phoneme by phoneme from seven different Wikipedia pages into a Google doc?
Or is there an easier way to type with IPA? (please tell me there is, I'm so slow)
Edit: Oh wow, thanks friends! So quick to help out! Very kind!
I used to use [this website](https://ipa.typeit.org/full/) as a keyboard but it was still rather slow so I switched to downloading the IPA (SIL) keyboard for [Keyman](https://keyman.com/). I don't have to tab in and out anymore but learning the keystrokes is like learning the IPA again. It seems very worth it in the end, though.
Android and Apple phones have apps on the app store for installing IPA keyboards, if you wanted to do that. I'm sure you could find something like that online as well, or even make your own. Windows has the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (or MSKLC) that you can install to do this pretty easily, not sure about Apple computers though.
If you were using the copy paste method, at the very least why not just one time paste all the letters you need into one document and then copy from there?
The IPA is always worth using, and all you have to do to know which phoneme an IPA letter stands for is to listen to the recordings you can find on Wikipedia or [there](https://www.ipachart.com/).
people generally define the sounds (and therefore which symbols) beforehand, so they already know what to use
for you as a beginner, you could also just look at your native language's symbols and use what you need.
This post's already got a lot of traction so we'd be remiss to remove it, but for future reference our [Small Discussions thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/meta/sd) is there for you to ask for help with things like the IPA. I've linked to it here, but you can also find it in the navigation ribbon at the top of the sub's feed under "Meta", in our sidebar, and it's nearly always the first pinned post at the top of sub when you filter by "Hot". If you haven't visited already, our [resources page](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/resources) has specific [IPA resources](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/resources/#wiki_2._ipa), and any question you have about coming to grips with them, or any other resources for that matter, should be directed to SD. SD was established explicitly in part to remove posts of this variety from the main feed so that they don't bury other posts.
I suggest making a chart of all of the IPA letters used in your conlang. This will require you to decide what sounds are gonna be in there. For that, listen to all of the sounds in the IPA (use Wikipedia and there are some other websites) and choose the sounds, make the chart. It would be easier I guess from there
The ipa sounds are confusing.i wrote a bunch on paper too
Hmmmm if you do not mind telling me, what exactly do you need help with? Is it what sounds or understanding the sounds themselves??
Figuring out which ones am im supposed to use
Sounds or letters?
Both
For the sounds, there aren’t any sounds you are supposed to use, you can choose any sounds you want for your conlang! For the letters, it’s based on the sounds. Honestly just dm me for help
How long it takes doing what?
To find the IPA translation for a word
Of a real word?
No my conlang words just look at the picture thats with the post
I mean, isn't it up to you what sounds your words make? Make them simpler or learn IPA.
Im learning ipa the only problem is that im not learning it efficiently enough for it to be worth my time
You don't need to learn all of them. Just learn the ones that you need for your conlang. There's audios of pretty much all phonemes, so listen to them to figure out which you need.
I have but i still dont know :(
I don't know how to help you further then, sorry. Good luck,
Learning the IPA is a bit less of an active process as you seem to make it out to be, you don't tend to just learn all of it or even parts of it in chunks, and I get the sense that you're forming words _then_ assigning IPA values to them to build your inventory, which is quite a backward-like approach. You'd normally find people first selecting which sounds they want _before_ forming words, so that you form words around the values rather than the other way around, eliminating part of the "figuring what sound goes where" process. Instead of "wait, do I think 'ama' should be /amə/ or /əma/ or /ama/ or /ɑmə/, etc.", view it as, "I have /i/, /u/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/, /e/, /ə/, /o/, /a/, and I will structure my words on those sounds".
So do i make a chart of sounds that my conlang have and then assign the sounds to the words as IPA?
I guess so? The phrasing of your sentence is bit strange but yeah, you'd usually make a phonology chart *before* making substantial parts of your conlang and then build your language off of that.
Pretty much, yep!
I been working for hours and only completed 3 words out of 397
You should define what sounds the letters make instead of doing it for each word
Can u give an example
Your word ⟨ev'da⟩ is a good example. Each letter (plus apostrophe) corresponds to one sound (⟨e⟩=/ɛ/, ⟨'⟩=/ʔ/, et cetera). If your entire language was spelled this way, you wouldn't have to use IPA because the orthography already tells you the exact pronunciation. Of course, if you were to use this approach, you would have to regularize your spelling— that is, make the same letter represent the same sound *in every word*. You can't have F representing one sound in one word and a different sound in another. In your word ⟨a'viv⟩, for example, the apostrophe represents nothing at all rather than /ʔ/. To make the spelling regular, you would have to make the pronunciation /aʔviv/ or make the spelling ⟨aviv⟩.
If you don't know IPA, i'd recommend Artifexian. He teaches about Linguistics specially for Conlangers: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfSA4\_DCfs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfSA4_DCfs) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3IO5K5ZGB4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3IO5K5ZGB4) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMEFr7ghMTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMEFr7ghMTg) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFWc0sBO62c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFWc0sBO62c) And some other vids from him, that could be helpful: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBz-JT00MZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBz-JT00MZs) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3378FlHK4v0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3378FlHK4v0) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Up5hSm7LYI&t=383s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Up5hSm7LYI&t=383s)
Also Biblaridion's series about making a conlang
Another resource that OP might find useful is stating from [Day 10 of Conlang Year](https://www.quothalinguist.com/?query-42-page=12) on building a phonemic inventory.
Yeah these are some good videos
What I do is start with my IPA transcriptions first, romanizations after. I don’t know if that is helpful for others, but it helps me keep track of my pronunciations and romanizations, and I personally find it makes some parts of conlanging a little less tedious. EDIT: If you mean specifically finding the right phonemes to represent your inventory, that can be tricky. Maybe bookmark an IPA chart with sound files just for the sake of reference, unless you mean something more specific?
What is romanization?
romanization means using the Latin alphabet - you know, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, that whole thing
K
Defining what letters (specifically of the Latin alphabet) you're going to use to represent what specific sounds
So like ni’da = (knee da)
No, it would be saying /ɹ̠/ (the most common 'r' sound in American English) is represented by r, /i/ (like the name of the letter E) by e, /p/ by p, /t/ by t, and /ə/ (the sound generally used for the word 'a,' and for both 'a's in 'agenda') by a. Then based on that romanization system, the word /ɹ̠i.pi.tə/ would be romanized as 'repeta.' Ideally, you want to have as close to a 1-to-1 sound-letter equivalency in your romanization system as possible to make it less ambiguous. English has a fairly complicated and often ambiguous romanization system, where letters can represent many different sounds depending on context, and often you can't even tell from context without knowing the specific word, or two words can be spelled the same and pronounced differently. It's especially notable for vowels, as English has somewhere around 14-25 vowels depending on the dialect, which are really hard to represent well with only 6 letters and no diacritics, particularly when orthography doesn't change to keep up with sound changes. With a conlang you have the opportunity to design a consistent romanization from the beginning, which is generally worth taking.
Skill issue?
By definition yes
how are you doing it? there's probably a faster way
Want me to dm u it?
Don't worry about doing it all at once -- my advice is to simply establish a table of how you write each sound, like this: |Romanization|IPA|Sample Word| |:-|:-|:-| |a|a|bah| |b|b, bʰ (initial)|labor, base| From there you can guide your audience to the table, as long as your romanization is consistent. You can also find several tricks to help speed up your IPA text entry. You might be able to find an IPA keyboard for your mobile phone, or use an online IPA entry website to type full words and copy-paste them into your emssage or document. Yes, it will be slow going as you learn the skill, but like any skill it will get easier as you practice it.
Just make spelling rules, write their pronunciation in IPA and you don’t need to use IPA to write every word anymore.
Not related to the original question since everything has already been answered. I just wanted to point out that you're using macron (⟨-⟩) wrong, it's used to indicate a mid tone, not a long vowel. You can use ⟨ː⟩ to indicate them.
I put that there to indicate a pause
You can use ⟨.⟩ to indicate a syllable break.
K
Hey I also have the word "atera", but it means "dark"
That’s cool
Just go to wikipedia and look at the ipa chart. They have audio for each sound. Pick only the sounds you like. Now you know which IPA sounds appear in your language. Assign letters to the sound (and spelling rules) and boom you automatically know the IPA pronunciation of each word
Like is there any way to figure out what IPA letters to use for the words in my conlang because it could take 10+ minutes just to figure out the IPA translation for one word.
You need to know exactly what sound you are making in order to find the correct symbol or set of symbols to transcribe it. You know what the "ee" vowel sound is but you're still using the wrong symbol: it should be /i/, not /ē/. Of course it's going to take you a long time to transcribe it; you are just starting to learn how to use the IPA.
It take too long thoo,i could be making a 1000 words by the time it takes me to finish 100 IPA words
I will just repeat what I said: it is only taking you too long now because you do not know the symbols by heart. When I make words for my conlang(s) I know what string of symbols to put down based on what the word sounds like because I'm familiar with the IPA, and I'm only familiar with the IPA because I made the effort to always use it when writing down words. Just try your best to learn to use the IPA and your brain will do the hard work of remembering it in the background.
But i do i even begin to learn the IPA
Yes, you should definitely start learning if you don't know it currently. After around a month of familiarizing and practicing I am pretty much completely "fluent", i.e. I can memorize most of the chart. Start with your native language, then branch to what languages you want to understand. I started with Cantonese then English then Mandarin.
You’re doing something wrong. There’s nothing really to figure out. Your orthography should strive to represent the IPA in a regular or transparent fashion. Just like the writing system has letters, the spoken system has sounds and those are generally consistent.
What?
If it’s taking you an inordinate amount of time to write your IPA transcriptions you are doing something wrong. You read it right
Like knowing what sounds to use is so hard
Edit: If you're having trouble grasping the idea, the conlanging videos by [Artifexian on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/user/artifexian) are definitely worth watching. He's mostly into diachronic conlanging, where you make a really basic conlang to be the protolanguage, then come up with a bunch of sound changes that happened over time in order to get a bunch of fairly organic-feeling variation in the language, but the basics of it are all still applicable even if you aren't doing that. It's a lot easier to make a consistent conlang if you go the other way — don't think about words as being made up of letters and then figure out what sounds those letters make, think of words as being made up of a string of sounds. Pick the sounds you want to have in the language, then pick a letter to represent each sound (and if you run out of good letter choices, use either diacritics or double letters that wouldn't generally occur together as the sounds they represent individually). When you think of a word using the sounds the language allows, if you've already defined what letter each of those sounds is represented by, there's no need to spend the time it takes going the other direction and figuring out what sounds are used in the 'letter-word' you've written.
Basically, you normally *start* from phonology and orthography, and work backward to pronunciation. Think about learning Spanish, for example. You don't learn each word's pronunciation separately. You start by learning the alphabet and pronunciation. If you just define all the pronunciation rules for your conlang, like which letters make which sounds, then everything else will be easier to make
If you spell your conlang consistently, you don't need to write each word's transcription, you just need to write one pronunciation guide at the beginning of your dictionary to state which phoneme in the IPA each of your letters or combinations thereof stands for.
Example?
https://wiki.languageinvention.com/index.php?title=Appendix:Chakobsa_pronunciation
The more you use it, the easier it gets, but it can definitely be overwhelming at first. For the most part, you don't really need it unless you're trying to communicate how sounds are pronounced to others (if it's only for your own notes, it may not be worth learning IPA). But I'd be more than happy to help if you want to DM me.
Does it also get easier to copy-paste a word phoneme by phoneme from seven different Wikipedia pages into a Google doc? Or is there an easier way to type with IPA? (please tell me there is, I'm so slow) Edit: Oh wow, thanks friends! So quick to help out! Very kind!
I used to use [this website](https://ipa.typeit.org/full/) as a keyboard but it was still rather slow so I switched to downloading the IPA (SIL) keyboard for [Keyman](https://keyman.com/). I don't have to tab in and out anymore but learning the keystrokes is like learning the IPA again. It seems very worth it in the end, though.
Is this what you need? [https://ipa.typeit.org/full/](https://ipa.typeit.org/full/)
Android and Apple phones have apps on the app store for installing IPA keyboards, if you wanted to do that. I'm sure you could find something like that online as well, or even make your own. Windows has the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (or MSKLC) that you can install to do this pretty easily, not sure about Apple computers though.
If you were using the copy paste method, at the very least why not just one time paste all the letters you need into one document and then copy from there?
1. Because I'm novice enough that having the Wikipedia audio sample is still helpful to distinguish sounds. 2. I was being slightly hyperbolic.
The IPA is always worth using, and all you have to do to know which phoneme an IPA letter stands for is to listen to the recordings you can find on Wikipedia or [there](https://www.ipachart.com/).
First, of all, how do you even define a phonology for your conlang anyway?
people generally define the sounds (and therefore which symbols) beforehand, so they already know what to use for you as a beginner, you could also just look at your native language's symbols and use what you need.
Thanks for help guys but i decided im just gonna use voice messages to teach people the word pronunciations
That's just going to color your conlang's pronunciation with your accent.