Template:IPA is most useful when there are multiple instances of the IPA on a page. It contains

<span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA">{{{1}}}</span>

I.e., it simply specifies CSS class IPA.

This allows fixing broken display of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) characters in MS Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, and choice of style in any browser.

The font declarations are in MediaWiki:Common.css. Registered Wikipedia users can specify their own style for IPA text by editing, for each project, their user style sheet, e.g. monobook.css. Users can also specify the style locally in their browser, which works across projects.

Placing a phonetic rendering of the word characters in Template:IPA:

{{IPA|/ˈkærəktɚz/}}

The result will be a span with a class attribute, like this:

<span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA">/ˈkærəktɚz/</span>

Which appears in your browser as:

/ˈkærəktɚz/

Without template:IPA:

/ˈkærəktɚz/

[The last two should only look different if you are using Internet Explorer 6 or lower on Windows, or if you have a custom style defined for IPA text.]

Please place all IPA text into Template:IPA, even if it doesn't have any special IPA characters, like this: [aɪ piː eɪ]. This will allow users to format all examples of IPA text consistently, with their choice of fonts, colours, etc.

Choosing an IPA template

កែប្រែ

Usage of IPA template

កែប្រែ

Wikipedia offers several templates for proper display of IPA transcriptions.

In general, instances of the IPA on a page should be enclosed in the {{IPA}} template, which formats the text in an IPA-compatible font. If a substantial portion of a page is in the IPA, it is customary to post notice of that fact with {{IPA notice|lang=en}}, though each token still requires the {{IPA}} template for proper formatting.

However, if there are not enough occurrences to warrant a notice, then consider a template that links to an IPA key for the first instance of the IPA on a page or section:

  • for English words, in a broad, non-regional transcription, as when giving the pronunciation of a key word in an article, use templates linking to Help:IPA for English, a chart of the subset of the IPA that is relevant to English:
  • for foreign words that are not assimilated into English, regional pronunciations of English words, and non-standard English dialects, use templates linking to the more general Help:IPA chart, containing all major IPA symbols:
    • {{IPA-all}}, appearing as: IPA: [word], or
    • for specific languages, there may be dedicated IPA keys for standardized transcription. There are several options for their display. The first cell includes the ISO code of the language; the second is the transcription; the third keys an introductory phrase; and the fourth is space for a sound file. Using the French word eau [o] as an example, we have the default format:
  • {{IPA-fr|o}}French pronunciation: [o]
Or the word "pronounced" can be used as the introduction:
  • {{IPA-fr|o|pron}}pronounced: [o]
Language name only:
  • {{IPA-fr|o|lang}}French: [o]
"IPA" only:
  • {{IPA-fr|o|IPA}}IPA: [o]
Link only:
  • {{IPA-fr|o|}}[o]
Any of these may be combined with a sound file:
For the default introductory phrase, however, a placeholder such as ‹-› is required:

Another type of language-specific template allows you to enter ordinary letters (or conventional ASCII equivalents) from a given language for automatic conversion to phonetic symbols. Those currently available are {{IPAc-cmn}} for Mandarin, {{IPAc-en}} for English, {{IPAc-fr}} for French, {{IPAc-ga}} for Irish, {{IPAc-hu}} for Hungarian and {{IPAc-pl}} for Polish. For example:

Various redirects have been created for languages which do not yet have dedicated templates. Although transcriptions which use these redirects will link to {{IPA-all}} for the time being, the articles will be pre-linked if and when a template is created. The more articles that use one of these redirects, the more likely it is that a dedicated template will be created for them.