Phonetic Alphabet

The nato phonetic alphabet is the most commonly used but we have included other british and american phonetic alphabets.

Phonetic alphabet. The main purpose of the phonetic alphabet is to provide a clearer way of spelling out words or using any letters or numbers in general over a radio or other communications device. The phonetic language also known as the spelling alphabet or the nato phonetic alphabet is used by professional communicators especially police military and other emergency and armed forces to identify letters precisely either when communicating initials abbreviations or spellings of words. The international phonetic alphabet ipa is an academic standard that was created by the international phonetic association. Ipa is a phonetic notation system that uses a set of symbols to represent each distinct sound that exists in human spoken language.

History of the phonetic alphabet. The international radiotelephony spelling alphabet commonly known as the nato phonetic alphabet or the icao phonetic alphabet is the most widely used radiotelephone spelling alphabet the itu phonetic alphabet and figure code is a variant. The phonetic alphabet is a special alphabet used by the us army and other military branches. The ipa is used by lexicographers foreign language students and teachers linguists speech language pathologists.

The term nato alphabet was adopted prior to the cold war as an alternative name for the icao phonetic alphabet after it was used in a publication for the navies of all nato members. Phonetic alphabet definition is a set of symbols such as the ipa used for phonetic transcription. The nato phonetic alphabet is a spelling alphabet a set of words used instead of letters in oral communication i e. To create the alphabet the international civil aviation organization icao assigned codewords acrophonically to the letters of the english alphabet so.

The los angeles police department lapd phonetic alphabet is still used with some variations by the lapd and other us agencies despite the introduction of the nato alphabet. Over the phone or military radio each word code word stands for its initial letter alphabetical symbol the 26 code words in the nato phonetic alphabet are assigned to the 26 letters of the english alphabet. The international phonetic alphabet ipa is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the latin alphabet it was devised by the international phonetic association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The icao phonetic alphabet was created and adopted primarily to avoid confusion among flight crews as some letters of the english alphabet can be easily confused when heard orally.

It encompasses all languages spoken on earth.