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Here is a basic key to the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. For the smaller set of symbols that is sufficient for English, see Help:IPA/English. Several rare IPA symbols are not included; these are found in the main IPA article or on the extensive IPA chart. For the Manual of Style guideline for pronunciation, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation.
For each IPA symbol, an English example is given where possible; here "RP" stands for Received Pronunciation. The foreign languages that are used to illustrate additional sounds are primarily the ones most likely to be familiar to English speakers: French, Standard German and Spanish. For symbols not covered by those, recourse is taken to the populous languages Standard Chinese, Hindustani, Arabic and Russian. For sounds still not covered, other well-analyzed languages are used, such as Swahili, Zulu and Turkish.
The left-hand column displays the individual symbols in square brackets ([a] ). Click on "listen" to hear the sound; click on the symbol itself for a dedicated article with a more complete description and examples from multiple languages. Consonant sounds are spoken once followed by a vowel and once between vowels.
If the characters do not display, you may need to install a supporting font. Free fonts with good IPA support include Gentium Plus (serif) and Andika (sans-serif).