International Phonetic Alphabet for English

While the slashes and brackets around IPA symbols are not part of the IPA itself, language professionals have adopted them to distinguish between two main types of transcription, phonemic and phonetic. In phonemic transcriptions, the observer uses slashes to record the phonemes speakers target when they pronounce a word. For example, a phonemic transcription of pit is /pɪt/. Because there are often a number of ways in which phonemes are produced in speech, observers use brackets to record the sounds that speakers actually produce, the allophones of the phonemes. For example, because English speakers typically aspirate a word-initial /p/ and sometimes do not release a word-final /t/, a phonetic transcription of this pit may look like this: [pʰɪt̚].