Conlang guide

NOTE: I've been made aware that in some browsers the IPA symbols don't show up correctly, I am currently unsure of how to fix this but if the IPA letters are not showing up on your screen try a different browser! Sorry for the inconvenience.

IPA deep dive

Disclaimer: as always I'd like to remind you that I'm not a linguist or a professional conlanger, I'm just a hobbyist talking about the things I've learned from conlanging and consuming pop linguistics content over the years, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

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(Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash)

Table of contents

Preamble

This page will teach you what the IPA is, why it's so useful for conlangers and how to use it yourself, if you're the type of conlanger who doesn't want to learn IPA or you think it's too intimidating or overwhelming that's ok! But I think if you look into it you will find that it's not nearly as complicated as you might have initially thought, it just takes some time to get used to the new letters but it's perfectly learnable if you put the effort into it and it's absolutely worth it.

Knowing how to read IPA for conlanging is like knowing how to read sheet music for musicians, you can definitely engage in the art without knowing it, but there's a bit of a ceiling to how far you can get without it, and you gain access to so many more resources and possibilities by learning it, so I'd encourage you to read this post (though, again, if you'd rather not learn IPA that's also perfectly fine! Feel free to skip this article if you're not interested).

There will be another article in the future where we delve into more advanced aspects of the IPA, but this should be a good place to get started if you're new to the topic.

Writing down your language's pronunciation

At one point or another every conlanger has to face the challenge of writing down the way their language is pronounced (as opposed to the way their language is spelled).

Making this separation in your mind between "letters" (a writing term) and "sounds" (a pronunciation term) is a very important concept for conlangers, after all, languages are often not spelled the way they're pronounced, so if you're dealing with pronunciation you don't want to be thinking in terms of letters. We want to make sure that we understand that this post is not about writing systems or orthographies, it's about how to represent the sounds of our languages.

Now, it might seem like a simple task at first but eventually you start to realize how complicated it can get. After reading this post you'll hopefully have a pretty good idea of how language sounds are written down and you'll be on your way to learning the IPA. It's time consuming but I personally think it's worth it if you're a conlanger.

So what makes it difficult in the first place?

The way a lot of people try to represent pronunciation is by giving English examples, so they'll write stuff like:

"this vowel is pronounced like the 'a' in 'water'"

And that might be good enough for the language creator, but for the people who come across this, they don't actually have a way of knowing how that vowel is meant to be pronounced, because the "a" in "water" is pronounced differently by people who speak USA dialects of English vs people who speak UK dialects vs people who speak Australian dialects.

What's more, even within one country the pronunciation of words can vary drastically, for example someone from New York City would pronounce the word "water" differently to how someone from Philadelphia would, so the person seeing the example above is left wondering where the conlanger is from in order to figure out what the vowel sound is supposed to be.

Also, using only English examples limits which sounds you can include in your language. Often times you'll be in a situation where you want to use consonant or vowel sounds that don't exist in English and now you don't even have any way of representing the pronunciation of that sound.

You could try to do a few other things, like using examples from another language, but you run into the same issue once again, every language has a lot of different dialects depending on where the speaker is from.

(Sidenote: these are commonly known as "accents" but linguists prefer the term "dialect" to avoid making value judgements or making any sort of implications that a certain way of speaking is "wrong", "not the default" or "non-standard", basically the different ways a language gets spoken are called dialects, so there's a New York dialect of English, and a Philadelphia dialect of English and so on).

Sometimes individual people can pronounce words in uncommon ways, for example, a famous conlanger David J. Peterson pronounces the word "both" with an L, as in, he pronounces it as if it was spelled "bolth" and you wouldn't have any way of knowing that even if you knew which dialect of English he speaks (because as far as I'm aware it's not a dialect-wide thing, it's fairly rare).

There's also the fact that spelling doesn't always match up perfectly with the way a word is pronounced, in most natural languages there is at least some discrepancy there (even in languages that are typically thought of as having straight-forward spelling, like Spanish) so spelling is not always the most reliable way to figure out pronunciations.

Often times people will think they're pronouncing a letter the same way in two different words when the sound is actually slightly different in each one, for example, in most English dialects the "t" in "stop" and the "t" in "top" are actually pronounced a bit different from each other, but native English speakers don't notice it, another example is the "h" in "hand" and the "h" in "human", again, native speakers will think they're saying the exact same consonant sound when they aren't, this phenomenon is known as "allophony" and it shows up in a loooot of natural languages, I will explain this allophony thing a bit more later.

Anyway, the point of all of that is that even though we might be tempted to use spelling as a way to figure out pronunciation, it's not always the most helpful.

Given all the problems stated above you could decide to give up on writing and record yourself pronouncing each sound, and that's not a bad idea! But even this idea has its issues, because some people are not comfortable posting recordings of themselves online, and even if you're comfortable with it, it can be difficult to tell apart subtle differences between certain consonants and certain vowels, especially if the quality of the recording is low or the background noise is loud, allophony is particularly difficult to tell apart in recordings sometimes.

Then how are you meant to write down pronunciation?

Here's the thing, this is a problem that linguists also had to deal with many decades ago, it's always been pretty difficult to represent pure sounds only using writing, which is a big problem for a science all about languages. It's difficult to study the sounds of languages if you don't have a way to unambiguously represent them.

And that's how we finally get to the solution to our problem! Back in 1888 a group of linguists invented what is known as the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA for short), that sounds complicated so let's break that down a bit.

The IPA

International

This is a global standard for how to represent sounds in writing, so no matter which language you're speaking the IPA works, it's completely detached from the orthographic rules of any language, it is merely a tool designed specifically to represent the sounds of speech.

Phonetic

This is a fancy word for "speech sound" basically, phonetic refers specifically to sounds that are used in languages (so a piano playing a g note (lmao) is a sound, but it's not used as a consonant or a vowel in any natural language, so it doesn't count as a phoneme). By the way, an individual speech sound is called a "phoneme" and I will be using that word a lot from now on.

Alphabet

Well, the IPA is an alphabet, and it's specifically based on the roman alphabet (the one we use to write English, Spanish, French, German, etc.) so if you're a speaker of a language that uses the roman alphabet the IPA should look relatively familiar to you, a lot of the letters are very straight forward in fact.

Characteristics

With the IPA you can know exactly how something is pronounced because each letter has only one possible pronunciation and it's pretty specific, so it makes it super easy to communicate about phonemes. You can even go into an absurd level of detail if you want to (though, you don't have to).

Also, something you should know is that phonetic transcriptions (the way people write down the sounds of a word or sentence) are usually written between slashes /like this/ or between square brackets [like this], there is a difference but it doesn't matter right now. The main thing I want you to keep in mind is that if you see funky symbols between slashes or square brackets you may be looking at a phonetic transcription made with the IPA (though some people use other systems for their phonetic transcriptions), these are often found at the beginning of wikipedia articles to tell you how a word is pronounced, they're also commonly found in posts containing conlang words or sentences.

When the IPA was first invented it was only able to represent phonemes from very few languages, like English, German and French, but over the decades linguists have been updating it and nowadays you can basically represent any phoneme in the world using the IPA, it has tons of symbols, so many in fact that a lot of people find it intimidating.

So if you're in the conlang community, chances are you've already heard of the IPA or you've seen it before, but a lot of people are afraid of learning it because it looks like it'd take too much effort or they assume that it's so complicated that they'll never be able to read it or use it, but let me tell you, if you're a conlanger it's totally worth learning IPA, it can be time-consuming, and some people might find it more difficult than others, but I would compare it to learning how to read and write sheet music, sure, you can get into music without knowing musical notation, but if you learn it you'll gain access to tons more resources and it's incredibly helpful for communicating your musical compositions to other people.

Once again, if you'd simply rather not learn it though you're allowed to do that, I personally recommend it because I found it very helpful for me but it may not be as helpful or important to you.

Before showing you the alphabet, one of the first things I recommend is that you don't try to learn it all at once, I mean, even I occasionally come across a symbol and think to myself "what the heck is that??"

Instead I think you should look at the IPA letters that represent the sounds of your native language (because they're the ones you already know how to pronounce) and you can learn more IPA letters as you come across them, little by little.

So, the IPA is divided into different sections, let's look at the main IPA chart and I will explain what the main sections are, once you understand how it's structured it will become a lot easier to wrap your head around the IPA, don't worry if you don't understand what you're looking at, just get a feel for what the IPA chart looks like.

The full IPA chart in IPA Kiel / LS Uni (serif) font [2020]

(The official chart of the IPA as of 2020 in IPA Kiel / LS Uni (serif) font from the International Phonetic Association)

As you can see it's divided into different tables, if you're a beginner conlanger you don't need to worry about the whole thing, the main things you'll be using are the consonant table at the very top and the vowel table below it to the right.

I will write other pages explaining the other parts of the IPA chart later, but for now let's just focus on the basics.

In the next section I will break down the basics for you, and there's going to be a lot of new terms and concepts for you to keep track of, so feel free to bookmark this page so you can refer back to this part whenever you want. You don't have to memorize it all, I just want you to understand the basic concept behind the tables.

Also I will be using example English words to try to give you an idea of the consonant I'm talking about, but as discussed above the pronunciation of words changes from dialect to dialect and person to person, so I'm also going to be including audio samples that show the exact sound I'm talking about (all of them are from Wikimedia commons).

At the end I will also share links to a few other resources, like interactive IPA charts with audio, IPA keyboards, fonts that are good for IPA, Youtube videos about the IPA and ways you can use Wikipedia to help you look up IPA symbols and concepts you're unfamiliar with.

CONSONANTS (PULMONIC)

The table at the top of the chart shows you the type of consonant that is most common across the world's languages, there's a few other consonant types not present in that table but you don't need to worry about those for now.

The important thing that makes this easier to understand is seeing how it's structured, first let's look at the columns: they tell you the place of articulation of the consonant, as in, where in the mouth the sound is made, I'll explain the ones you'll come across most often:

Places of articulation

As for the rest, you don't need to learn them right now, if you come across sounds from the other columns you can look up the places of articulation on Wikipedia, in fact, Wikipedia is a really good resource to learn the IPA, I'll explain more of that later, but for now let's look at the rows, these tell us the manner of articulation of the consonant, as in how the sound is made, again, let's just look at the ones you'll see most often:

Manners of articulation

Also, "Lateral" isn't a complete manner of articulation, it combines with Approximants or Fricatives, so you can have a "Lateral Approximant" or a "Lateral Fricative"

Incidentally, Approximants that aren't Laterals are sometimes referred to as "Semivowels" or "Glides"

Voicing

One last thing you should know about the consonant table is why a lot of these phonemes come in pairs, for example [p] and [b] are both in the same cell of the table, they're both bilabial (made with both lips) and plosives (they stop the airflow briefly) so what's the difference between them? The difference is something called voicing.

Voicing is easier to demonstrate with fricatives, so let's look at the sounds [s] and [z] (the alveolar fricatives) basically all sounds on the left side of a cell are "unvoiced" or "voiceless", which means that your vocal folds are not vibrating when you pronounce the sound, whereas all the sounds on the right side of a cell are "voiced", which means that your vocal folds are vibrating when you pronounce those sounds.

If you want to feel the difference yourself do the next exercise with me:

Put your fingers gently over your neck, now pronounce the sound [s] (like the "s" in "song") and hold it: sssssssss, you shouldn't feel any vibration with your fingers because the sound is voiceless, now do the same for the sound [z] (like the "z" in "zoo") and hold it: zzzzzzz, you should feel a bit of vibration because the sound is voiced, in fact you can go back and forth between the two sounds: ssss-zzzz-ssss-zzzz and you'll feel how the vibration is only present for the voiced sounds.

Note, if you're not a native English speaker and you don't know how to pronounce the [z] sound you could try feeling the vibration of other voiced sounds, like [m] or [b], I'm a native Spanish speaker, and since Spanish doesn't have the [z] sound I actually didn't know how to pronounce it for a long time).

Naming and looking up IPA consonants

So that's how the consonant table works! A good thing to keep in mind is that the name of each symbol is:

voicing + place of articulation + manner of articulation

So when talking to conlangers you could say "the voiceless postalveolar fricative" and people will know that you're talking about the [ʃ] sound (that's the same sound as the "sh" in "shoe" by the way).

Using these names you can easily look up consonant sounds on Wikipedia, every single IPA phoneme has a Wikipedia page, I'm pretty sure most of them have an audio sample showing how the phoneme sounds (when they don't you can look for audio on Wikimedia commons).

Each article has a lot of information about the phoneme, and my favorite part: if you scroll down you can see a section called "Occurrence" and it shows you a big list of natural languages that have that exact phoneme, it even shows you example words (highlighting the letters that make that sound in the word) with IPA transcriptions and occasionally even audio samples for some words!

This is super useful as a conlanger, if you're not sure how to spell a sound in your conlang it's very useful to check how natural languages do it.

(Screenshot of the first part of the Occurrence table for the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ] phoneme from Wikipedia)

That isn't even half the table by the way, it's huge, and typing the name of a consonant into youtube can also take you to a video of someone pronouncing the exact phoneme (though not all consonants have a video showing how they sound, plus from what I've heard there's people who say that some videos aren't the most accurate, but it's still a pretty cool resource that you can check out).

The IPA is good for improving your pronunciation

One more huge advantage that comes with learning how the consonants work in the IPA is that now it'll be easier for you to learn how to pronounce new consonants that you're not familiar with! If you come across a sound you don't know, you can look up what its IPA symbol is and you get a bunch of information about it: you'll know where in the mouth it's pronounced, you'll know what manner of articulation you should use and you'll know the voicing, and that's a huge help.

Sounds that you don't know how to pronounce often share a place or manner of articulation with sounds that you do know, so you probably know how to pronounce velar consonants like [k] or [ɡ], but you might not be familiar with the voiceless velar fricative [x] or the voiced velar approximant [ɰ], but just by knowing that these sounds are velar you have an idea of the position your tongue is meant to be in when producing these consonants, plus knowing fricatives will give you an additional hint for pronouncing [x] and knowing approximants will also give you an additional hint for pronouncing [ɰ].

Learning the IPA actually made me better at pronouncing foreign languages and I even get compliments occasionally by people telling me I'm good at pronouncing many different languages, don't get me wrong, I'm not perfect at it, but I'm better than the average person because I can look up and read IPA transcriptions of foreign words, it might take you some time to get to the point where you've learned enough IPA letters to be able to read any transcriptions you come across, but once you get there it's an awesome feeling, and of course it means you can also understand how other people's conlangs are pronounced and communicate how yours are pronounced to other conlangers.

Okay, after all of that let's look at the vowel table, this will be a bit faster, but pronouncing vowel phonemes accurately can be a bit difficult for some native English speakers because English vowels are incredibly complex, incidentally vowels are one of the things that changes a lot between dialects, so I won't be giving English examples, I will only show the audio samples (once again, all of them from Wikimedia commons).

VOWELS

First thing you'll notice: it's a funny shape, it's not a simple rectangle, that's because the shape of the table is like a diagram showing you where you should put your tongue to pronounce the vowel

As you can see, if we put the shape over a diagram of a mouth facing to the left it shows us the position the tongue needs to be in to pronounce each vowel phoneme, this is an important concept to keep in mind for the rest of this section.

So in the columns we have:

Backness

If you want to feel the difference in backness you can try saying the [i] vowel (similar to "ee" in "see") and then saying the [u] vowel (similar to the "oo" in "mood") and you can go back and forth between them: ee-oo-ee-oo, you should feel your tongue move backwards and forwards in your mouth.

Height

High vowels (also known as Close vowels) are pronounced with your tongue towards the roof of your mouth, the mouth tends to be kinda closed when pronouncing these vowels (examples are [i] and [u] respectively).

Mid vowels can be divided into "High-mid" a.k.a. "Close-mid" and "Low-mid" a.k.a. "Open-mid" the only difference is that the tongue is a bit higher with the first set and a bit lower with the second set, let's look at the High-mid set only, because those are more common.

Rounding

Just like last time, the phonemes come in pairs, so [i] and [y] have the same backness and height, what's the difference between them? Well the vowels on the left side of a pair are unrounded (meaning that your lips should be relaxed when pronouncing them), while the vowels on the right side of a pair are rounded (meaning that you purse your lips when pronouncing them) so [y] is actually pretty easy to pronounce, just try making an "ee" sound as in "see" and slowly round your lips without moving your tongue (so you're going from [i] to [y]).

Incidentally [y] is the sound that is written like "ü" in German, so now you know how to pronounce the German "ü" sound!

Oh yeah, and the way you name a vowel sound is as follows:

height + backness + rounding

So the vowel [ɤ] is the Close-mid Back Unrounded vowel, and just like with the consonants you can look them up on Wikipedia to see information on any vowel, an audio sample and a whole lot of examples of the vowel appearing in natural languages, it's pretty great!

Just as a fun fact for you, the vowel written like an upside down e [ə] is actually pretty popular among linguistics enthusiasts, it even has it's own name: schwa /ʃwɑ/ and the reason it's so popular is because it's the most common vowel in English, it can even be spelled using any vowel letter:

(by the way, all of the transcriptions above are using USA English pronunciation).

Now let's talk about English briefly, because as I said, English vowels are surprisingly complex, if you look at the letters you only have "a" "e" "i" "o" "u" and maybe "y" if you also count that, but if we look at the vowels phonemes that English has we see something more like this:

(Received Pronunciation English monophthong chart from Wikimedia commons)

This is specifically for "Received Pronunciation" which is the British dialect of English that you would hear on the BBC. You can see that this has a lot of stuff going on! And this is one of the reasons why it's a good idea to learn IPA instead of referencing English vowels with example words, these change a lot from dialect to dialect and they're complicated and difficult for a lot of people to pronounce.

One last thing I want to bring up is that commonly you will see a couple of things in conlangs and IPA transcriptions in general:

Long phonemes

Do you see those symbols in the English vowel chart that look like triangular colons? ( ː ) These mark when a phoneme is long, many different languages distinguish between short and long consonants, and many distinguish between short and long vowels, so when you see ( ː ) after a symbol you know the phoneme is long, in the conlang community some people just type it as a regular colon ( : ) for convenience.

For example Japanese has long vowels, so the word 上手 (じょうず - jōzu) is transcribed into IPA as /d͡ʑoːzu/, you see how there's a long symbol ( ː ) after the o? that indicates that you hold the /o/ vowel longer than if it was a regular vowel.

Syllable breaks

Not all phonetic transcriptions divide words into syllables, but those that do will use a period ( . ) between each syllable.

For example the word "alphabet" in General American English is transcribed into IPA as /æl.fə.bɛt/, you can see that the word has three syllables and it's clear where each one begins and ends.

Stressed syllables

Stress in a syllable is basically when you pronounce one syllable stronger than the rest, like it's the main emphasis of the word, for example "present" (as in a gift) has the stress in the first syllable: "I gave you a present" vs "present" (as in to introduce something or someone) has the stress in the second syllable: "I present to you the solution to your problems".

Not all languages have stress, but a lot of them do and it's kind of rare to see a phonetic transcription of English that doesn't mark where the stressed syllables are, these are marked by writing a high tick [ ˈ ] at the beginning of the stressed syllable, and when a syllable has secondary stress it's written with a low tick [ ˌ ] at the beginning of that syllable.

So the example words from earlier are transcribed into IPA like so:

present (as in a gift): /ˈpɹɛ.zənt/

present (as in to introduce something or someone): /pɹɪˈzɛnt/

And the stress in the word "alphabet" is marked as follows: /ˈæl.fəˌbɛt/, the first syllable is stressed and the last one has secondary stress so it's a bit stronger than usual but not as strong as the main stress.

Broad transcriptions vs Narrow transcriptions

Ok, this is the last basic thing you should learn about the IPA, let me finally explain the difference between when you should use the /slashes/ and when you should use the [square brackets] to write a phonetic transcription, it's fairly simple actually, it depends on the type of transcription that you're making, and there's only 2 types:

/Broad transcriptions/

Broad transcriptions are written between /slashes/ and they're meant to be easier to type and read but they're less precise, so for example, the English r sound is usually transcribed with the upside down r symbol [ɹ] because it's a voiced alveolar approximant, but if you don't want to type that weird symbol it's ok! As long as it's clear from the context that you're talking about English you can just type a regular r in broad transcription /r/ and it'll be clear that you mean the voiced alveolar approximant, because that's the only "r" sound that English has.

This also means you can omit details that are too specific, remember the phenomenon of "allophony" I mentioned earlier? Well, allophonic sounds are spelled using the same symbol in broad transcriptions, because even though they're technically different sounds from each other, native speakers of the language will think of them as being identical, so let's transcribe the examples of allophony I listed earlier (in USA English).

stop /stɑp/ - top /tɑp/

hand /hænd/ - human /ˈhjuː.mən/

As you can see the "t" sound in both "stop" and "top" is transcribed as being identical, despite the fact that in reality there's a subtle difference, the same thing applies to the "h" sound as well.

[Narrow transcriptions]

Narrow transcriptions on the other hand are written between [square brackets] and they're meant to be more precise, but as a result they can be a bit more difficult to type and read if you're not familiar with the symbols.

When you're using narrow transcription you're supposed to represent the way the word is pronounced in as much detail as possible, not omitting small details or changing letters for things that are easier to type.

In the case of allophones, if you're writing a narrow transcription you're meant to show the difference between them, because again, the goal of a narrow transcription is to be as precise as possible, so the allophones listed above would be transcribed like this (again, in USA English).

stop [stɑp] - top [tʰɑˀp]

hand [hɛənd] - human [ˈçju̟mən]

Now we can see that the "t" in "top" has a small h next to it, and the "h" in "human" isn't even written using the "h" symbol! It's using that funny French c instead (don't worry if you're not able to read these transcriptions yet, you can slowly learn more symbols over time), so as you can see the narrow transcription is more accurate but it's a bit harder to read if you're not familiar with the symbols being used.

When conlanging I like using narrow transcriptions so there is no question as to which sounds I'm talking about, but you could use either type of transcription honestly, it doesn't make too much of a difference, I just thought it was important for you to know that there is a difference between the two types.

I mention the transcription types because occasionally you might come across a word that has two transcriptions next to each other, one with slashes and one with brackets, when that happens you now know which transcription is which, and you know that the narrow transcription is the more accurate and precise one, but the broad transcription is good enough, especially if you're a beginner.

That's all the basics!

That's all of the basics of the IPA! Congratulations! 🎊 You are now familiar with how the IPA works and you can start learning the letters for all sorts of different sounds, as mentioned earlier knowing IPA can help you with improving your pronunciation, with communicating how your conlang is pronounced to others and with figuring out how unfamiliar words are pronounced.

Every time you come across a conlang post online that shows an IPA transcription you will be able to look at it and decipher what it means, looking up letters you're unfamiliar with every time you need to.

Phonetic Inventories

One of the cool things you can do now that you know how IPA works is look at language's "phonetic inventories", that sounds fancy and scary but all it is is a chart that shows you all of the consonants and vowels that exist in a language! Super useful both as a language learner and as a conlanger (keep in mind that these charts depend on the dialect you're looking at, for example the vowel chart of English will look very different depending on if you're looking at a British dialect or a USA dialect or an Australian dialect).

If you look up a language name in Wikipedia you will often times find that it either has a "phonology" section or it links to a page that's called something like "(language name) phonology" and when you go there it will usually show you charts with all the consonants and vowels of the language, so if you're interested in learning a language or you want to find some inspiration when coming up with your conlang's phonetic inventory this is very useful.

I strongly recommend that you look up the phonetic inventory of your native language (and preferably try to find a chart that represents the sounds found in the dialect you speak, if it's available) so you can familiarize yourself with the IPA letters that you already know how to pronounce, if you learn those letters you will have a solid foundation and you can expand on it by looking at other languages that you're familiar with, this way you slowly learn more and more of the IPA and eventually you'll be as comfortable using it as any other conlanger.

How to type in IPA

Here's a link to an online IPA keyboard so you can type IPA letters by the way. it's super useful, and if you're going to be doing a lot of conlanging you may want to install a custom keyboard layout on your computer.

(A screenshot of the IPA keyboard from https://ipa.typeit.org/full/)

I made my own custom layout using an app called Ukelele for mac (yes, I'm a mac user), but I'm sure there's plenty of pre-made IPA layouts out there that are available for download, I just haven't looked them up, but if I look them up I'll link them here or maybe write another page all about keyboard layouts.

There's also apps that let you install IPA keyboards on your phone, so you can type IPA symbols even while you're not on your computer, in case you do conlanging on mobile.

Presumably you can look up "IPA keyboard" in the App Store or the Play Store and see what's available for your phone.

Fonts for IPA

Not all fonts support IPA symbols, but there's a few fonts that come with Windows and MacOS computers that do support IPA (if you use Linux you might want to use open source fonts instead, but I'm not a Linux user, so I don't know how it works).

Those fonts are Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New, and you can use Helvetica or Helvetica Neue on MacOS, so those are the easiest options you can pick because chances are you don't need to download anything, it's already available on your computer.

There's not that many fonts that support IPA in general, but if you want a wider variety of choices check out this list (they're all either free to download or come preinstalled in most computers):

Serif

Sans Serif

Monospace

Pixel

I would like to point out that some of these fonts don't support every single IPA symbol perfectly, so if you need to use an obscure symbol that your font of choice doesn't support you may want to switch to Gentium Book Plus or Source Sans 3 since they both support a huge amount of the IPA.

Wiktionary

A great website I strongly recommend you use is Wiktionary, it's a huge online dictionary containing words from hundreds of languages, including even some ancient ones, it has a lot of information on each word including its origin, conjugations and an IPA transcription! Sometimes it also has audio files showing what the word sounds like and sometimes it even has multiple IPA transcriptions for different dialects of the same language! It's awesome!

Unfortunately not all words have the same amount of detail, if you're looking at more obscure languages it's possible that they won't have an IPA transcription, but there is still a huge amount of information that you can learn about a lot of different languages so I still recommend the website.

It's also great for looking up translations for words, if you look up a word in English you can scroll down to a section called "Translations" and it will display a big table of words that mean the same thing in a lot of other languages, sometimes you will even see that a word has multiple translation tables (because words can have multiple different meanings, so each one will be translated separately). This also means that you can click on any of the foreign words and it will take you to the page for that word, which is incredibly useful.

Interactive IPA chart

Here's a link to an interactive IPA chart that pronounces a sound when you click on the symbol! I think if you're having trouble with your internet connection sometimes you will click a letter and it won't play the sound, but it's still pretty cool and useful for learning.

I've also realized that if you're not familiar with the IPA you could simply use these type of interactive IPA charts with sound in order to pick the sounds for your conlang, since it provides you with a fairly easy way to actually hear what the sounds are like.

Help: IPA

The page named Help: IPA on Wikipedia is actually pretty useful for picking the sounds of your language or learning new letters, because not only does it come with audio samples but it also gives approximations in English and sometimes even equivalents from other languages.

I have a website where I write about my conlangs and I started linking to that Wikipedia page any time there's IPA involved so that if someone comes across the conlang website without prior knowledge of the IPA they can get a very quick introduction to it.

Youtube videos and media on the IPA and phonology

I'll link you to a few videos that I think do a pretty good job at explaining the history and some interesting characteristics of the IPA below, be aware that some of the information they talk about is stuff I already covered here, but they all talk about extra stuff that I didn't mention in this article, plus, hearing the same concept described in different ways is often a great way to learn in my experience.

I also recommend you check out their channels, they're all really interesting and have videos relating to linguistics or conlanging.

6:30 - posted 2 Sep 2019

Tom talks about why English spelling is so messy, why some of the cells in the consonant table are empty and why some of them are greyed out.

8:32 - posted 13 Aug 2014

Xidnaf /ˈzɪd.naf/ talks about the creation of the IPA and the rules that were followed when designing the alphabet, they also give a good example of allophony in English.

34:36 - posted 16 Mar 2017

This podcast is amazing for learning about linguistics and the way it applies to the real world, the impact it has on people's lives. In this episode Lauren and Gretchen go over the history of the IPA, the way it works and a bunch of fun facts and related trivia about it. (They also have merch related to the IPA, this isn't sponsored, I'm just the kind of nerd who thinks this is awesome).

The next few videos aren't strictly about the IPA, but now that you understand the IPA these are pretty good videos to watch for conlangers.

4:37 - posted 13 Oct 2015

This guy is the creator of a lot of popular conlangs like Dothraki (from Game of Thrones) and Chakobsa (from Dune), and his series "The Art of Language Invention" is a great resource for conlangers, I learned a lot watching him, in this video David gives a pretty basic introduction to phonetic inventories and suggests a basic inventory that's easy for most people in the world to pronounce.

14:02 - posted 24 Sep 2018

If you want a more advanced video that explains how to create the phonetic inventory of your language this is it, I also strongly recommend his series "How to Make a Language" it's pretty detailed and great for beginners.

5:54 - posted 30 Dec 2016

This one is good to open your eyes to the variety that exists across the world's languages, Josh talks about some of the rare phonemes that exist around the world, sounds you probably didn't know existed and that I didn't mention in the article. His channel is one of my favorites, I encourage you to check out his other work, this was one of my biggest conlang inspirations back when I first got into linguistics.

Conclusion

I want to thank you for reading all of this! It took many many many hours to write, but I think it could be a really useful resource for those of you who find the IPA intimidating. I didn't learn it overnight but it's made conlanging and even language learning easier for me, so I hope it helps you too.

Don’t forget to stay hydrated and have a good timezone ✨