Skip to content
X-SAMPA
EntityQ614484· pop 31· linked from 755 articles

Also known as XSAMPA, Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet

The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual-language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the 1993 version of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit ASCII.

~26 min read

Encyclopedic overview

12 sections
Contents
  • Summary
  • Notes
  • Lower-case symbols
  • Upper-case symbols
  • Other symbols
  • Diacritics
  • Charts
  • Consonants
  • Vowels
  • See also
  • References
  • External links

The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual-language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the 1993 version of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit ASCII.

SAMPA was devised as a hack to work around the inability of text encodings to represent IPA symbols. Later, as Unicode support for IPA symbols became more widespread, the necessity for a separate, computer-readable system for representing the IPA in ASCII decreased. However, X-SAMPA is still useful as the basis for an input method for true IPA.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “X-SAMPA” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (40)