International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association, starting in the late 19th century, as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech. The IPA is used by linguists, lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
The IPA is designed to represent those qualities of speech that are part of lexical (and, to a limited extent, prosodic) sounds in spoken (oral) language: phones, intonation and the separation of syllables.