There are only a finite amount of speech sounds that can be made. To address this, the International Phonetic Alphabet, also known as IPA, was created in the late 1800s to symbolize all human phonetics. To effectively condense all of these characters into an understandable format, a chart was also created.

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), an alphabet developed in the 19th century to accurately represent the pronunciation of languages. One aim of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) was to provide a unique symbol for each distinctive sound in a language—that is, every sound, or phoneme , that serves to distinguish one word from another.

The official International Phonetic Alphabet, and its organization in a chart, is maintained by the Association. As noted in our 1999 Handbook (Appendix 4), modifications have always been the result of "members making proposals for changes, which were published in the journal and voted on by the Association's Council" (p. 196). Only changes to the alphabet or chart that have been …