IPA commonly refers to: . India pale ale, a style of beer; International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation; IPA may also refer to:

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script.It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language …

In 2009, for the first time in history, Spanish was the most common "mother tongue" language of the western world, more than English. It was also the second most common language on Earth, after Chinese. As of 2016, the three most common languages in the world are: Chinese: Spoken by about 1.305 billion people