Extensions to the IPA

The Extensions to the IPA are extensions of the International Phonetic Alphabet and were designed for disordered speech. However, some of the symbols (especially diacritics, below) are occasionally used for transcribing normal speech as well, particularly in certain languages.

Brackets
The Extended IPA for speech pathology has added additional bracket notations. Parentheses are used to indicate mouthing (silent articulation), as in, a silent sign to hush; parentheses are also used to indicate silent pauses, for example (...). Double parentheses indicate obscured or unintelligible sound, as in ((2 syll.)), two audible but unidentifiable syllables. Curly brackets with Italian musical terms are used to mark prosodic notation, such as.

Extended IPA letters


The last symbol may be used with the alveolar click for, a combined alveolar and sublaminal click or "cluck-click".

Extended IPA diacritics
The ExtIPA has widened the use of some of the regular IPA symbols, such as for pre-aspiration,  for uvularization, or  for a linguolabial sibilant, as well as adding some new ones. Some of the ExtIPA diacritics are occasionally used for non-disordered speech, for example for the unusual airstream mechanisms of Damin.

One modification is the use of subscript parentheses around the phonation diacritics to indicate partial phonation; a single parenthesis at the left or right of the voicing indicates that it is partially phonated at the beginning or end of the segment. For example, is a partially voiced,  shows partial initial voicing, and  partial final voicing; also  is a partially devoiced ,  shows partial initial devoicing, and partial final devoicing. These conventions may be convenient for representing various voice onset times.

Phonation diacritics may also be prefixed or suffixed rather than placed directly under the segment to represent relative timing. For instance, is a pre-voiced , a post-voiced, and is an  with a creaky offglide.

Other ExtIPA diacritics are:

In addition to these symbols, a subscript indicates that an articulation is laterally offset to the left or right.

Prosodic notation
The ExtIPA also makes use of Italian musical notation for the tempo and dynamics of connected speech. These are subscripted within a {curly brace} notation to indicate that they are comments on the prosody.

Pauses are indicated with periods or numbers inside parentheses.