Criticisms of the IPA

[Christina S]

Could you tell us a little about the criticisms/controversies surrounding the IPA? You implied in yesterday’s lecture that there might be some racist undertones to the system. What else? Are there alternative phonetics systems to consider which have strengths versus the IPA or is the field firmly centred around the IPA these days?

[Catherine Lai]

Hi Christina,

It’s a complicated issue, but there’s some discussion of this in this public facebook group that you might find interesting:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/551898862199586/permalink/695289281193876

One of the issues is that contrasts that are important for many non-European languages are relegated to diacritics or general made to seem much less frequent than they actually are if we look at different languages and speakers. Basically it’s not a theory neutral representation of the range of speech sounds.

There’s a nice interface that links to papers that describe how to transcribe non-European languages here that you might find interesting (noted by Amalia Arvaniti in that thread).

Similarly, many speech technologies depend on phonetic transcription (e.g. pronunciation dictionaries), where the transcription system is tailored to the language or accent that you want to develop the technology for. So in practice the IPA doesn’t work that well as a sort of general purpose transcription system (though there are some other computational issues that historically came into play here!).

Rebekka will have more to say about this but it may also be something to discuss in office hours (as Rebekka probably won’t be in the lab again for another few weeks).

cheers,
Catherine

[Author]

Posts