What is IPA in linguistics?

IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet. It is a standardized system of symbols used to represent the sounds (phonemes) of spoken language. In linguistics, phonemes are the basic units of sound in a language, and different languages have different sets of phonemes. The IPA provides a way for linguists to accurately transcribe and compare the sounds of different languages, without relying on the irregularities and inconsistencies of individual writing systems. For example, the English letter "c" can represent different sounds in words like "cat" and "cent," but in IPA, we can distinguish between these sounds using the symbols /k/ and /s/. This allows linguists to describe and analyze the phonetic and phonological properties of different languages using a common set of symbols.