Vocal & Choral Diction Blog

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a wonderful tool that provides a unique symbol for each sound in every language on Earth, allowing you to learn to sing songs and pronounce words in practically any language without necessarily devoting the years it would take to master that language. Part of learning to use IPA includes deciding exactly how much detail you would like included in the transcription, which will affect your pronunciation. There are two main types of transcription: narrow and broad.

A narrow transcription seeks to represent the exact pronunciation of a speaker or dialect. Think of the regional differences that may lead to you pronouncing a word differently than someone else who is also a native speaker of your language. Depending on whether you're from America or England, you probably pronounce certain English words differently. Or if you're from the Boston area, you're likely to pronounce the word "park" very differently from, say, a person from Atlanta. Narrow transcriptions are often very detailed and often utilize more phonetic symbols in order to precisely account for these slight differences between speakers and dialects.

In contrast, broad transcriptions are more of a general approximation of how a native speaker would pronounce a word, sentence, or song. Although broad transcriptions are not as detailed as narrow transcriptions, they still include enough information to learn the correct intonation and inflection for a new language. For the most part, the IPA transcriptions created by this website would fall under the broad category, as they contain enough information to approximate the sounds of a language without delving into subtle regional inflections.

Each type of transcription has its own advantages and disadvantages. Narrow transcriptions can help learners make exactly the right sound, but they often include a larger number of symbols. These diacritic marks, which indicate a specific pronunciation, may be unfamiliar to those just beginning to learn about IPA transcription. Broad transcriptions tend to be more representative of all speakers of a language and may be easier to understand for newcomers to phonetic transcription newcomers. They may lack nuance, however, and leave out the subtle differences in regional pronunciations. So, think carefully about which type of transcription you would like to use!