One Symbol Per Sound, No Matter the Language
The IPA was built so a French speaker could read aloud a Korean word and a linguist in Brazil could write it down the same.
Paul Passy, a French phonetics teacher, founded the Association Phonétique Internationale in 1886 with a small group of language teachers frustrated by spelling. They wanted a notation in which every distinct sound a human mouth makes had exactly one symbol — and every symbol meant exactly one sound, regardless of the language being transcribed.
The first IPA chart was published in 1888. The current chart, last revised in 2020, lists about 107 letters, 31 diacritics, and 19 marks for things like tone, stress, and length. The English word cat in IPA is /kæt/. The German ich is /ɪç/, with a /ç/ symbol that English doesn't bother distinguishing in writing.
The organizing trick is that the symbols sit on a grid that maps to your mouth. Consonants are arranged left-to-right by where in the mouth they're made (lips, teeth, palate, throat) and top-to-bottom by how the air gets out (stops, fricatives, nasals). Vowels sit on a trapezoid that mirrors the tongue's actual position when you make them. Once you've learned the geometry, you can almost guess unfamiliar symbols.
This is why dictionaries, language textbooks, opera coaches, and field linguists all converged on the same notation. A Mandarin tone, an Arabic emphatic, a Khoisan click, a Cockney glottal stop — each has its own square on the chart, and a trained reader can produce them without having heard the language.
Most writing systems were never built to capture sound precisely. The IPA was built for nothing else.
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