IPA Segments Without Letters

If you inspect the IPA chart, you’ll notice empty squares. It means the sound exists, but no symbol has been designated. It means using an existing symbol with diacritics is more convenient. To better understand segments without letters, it’s essential to look at how speech symbols are broken down. 

What Are IPA Segments

In linguistics, speech is divided into core sound expressions called phones or segments. As of 2005, the IPA includes 107 segmental letters, many suprasegmental letters, and 44 diacritics. Segments are individual sounds transcribed with one unique symbol in the IPA. Suprasegmental refers to features such as tone, stress, or others that accompany consonants and vowels. These features often spread over syllables, words, or phrases, and some are common between languages. 

Segments are pronounced with the vocal tract, including the larynx, lips, and nose. Sounds made with other body parts, such as snapping your fingers, are not part of phonetics. Segments can influence each other through the articulation process by the way they are grouped into syllables. They can also be broken down into smaller components known as features. Features can be controlled independently, and changing just one is important enough to alter the properties of a segment. Without supra-segmental and segmental features, speech can convey meaning but may lose essential parts of the message. 

Consonants, sonorants, and syllabics are the most common features used to group speech segments into classes of vowels, consonants, and glides. Because some segments have standard features and behave alike within a language, some can be expressed without letters. Consonants and vowels are speech segments that form a syllable. 

IPA Consonant Segments

The IPA chart is organized efficiently. The symbols for consonant sounds outside the core set yet delivering a similar sound value are indicated by adding diacritics to letters. The core set of consonants is classified by their delivery. The three components of the articulatory description are the place and manner of articulation and the voicing. Consonants can be partially or wholly constricted by obstructed airflow in the vocal tract. 

On the IPA chart, articulation areas are listed along the top, starting at the front of the mouth, the lips, and gradually back towards the glottis. At the left of the chart, down the side, are a list of manners of articulation. From the top of the chart, symbols move from the greatest obstruction to the least. These are the plosives and stops followed by the approximants with the least airflow obstruction. 

IPA Vowel Segments

Vowel sounds are produced with an open and unobstructed vocal tract and are richer and more resonant. The central part of the tongue moves to shape each vowel, and the addition of rounded lips occurs with other vowels. Vowels are classified by linguists based on four points of tongue and lip position: 

• Tongue Height
• Tongue Backness
• Lip Rounding
• Tenseness

Vowel sounds outside the core set use diacritics for lowering, raising, backing, fronting, centering, and mid-centering tongue position. Instead of rectangles, IPA vowels are in shapes like trapezoids on the chart. This method helps visually link the direct ways the tongue position and the shape of the mouth correspond.