SAMPA

The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet or SAMPA is a computer-readable phonetic alphabet using 7-bit ASCII characters. It is based on the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA.

It was developed by the ESPRIT information technology research and development program belonging to what was the European Economic Community (now the European Union) in the eighties. The initial purpose was to apply it to six European languages. They tried to use as many IPA symbols as possible, but where that was not possible they used alternative symbols. For example, [@] for the English weak vowel sound schwa, [2] for the French vowel sound deux, and [9] for the French vowel sound < i>neuf.

Today, SAMPA has been officially developed for all sounds of the languages listed below:

The characters ["s{mp@] represent the pronunciation of the name of SAMPA in English. Like the IPA, SAMPA is usually closed between square brackets, which do not belong to the alphabet itself and only serve a differentiating function to indicate that they are phonetic characters and not regular written text.

SAMPA problems

SAMPA tables are only valid in those languages for which they are designed. The tables of the different languages are not compatible with each other and that creates conflicts between the different languages. As a consequence, SAMPA cannot be used as an alternative ASCII representation to the general IPA alphabet. X-SAMPA was created to solve that problem. This other code provides a single table with no specific differences between languages.

See also:

• A concise version of the representation in SAMPA for Spanish.
• Kirshenbaum
• Unicode and HTML/IPA Extensions