Help:IPA/Japanese
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 | This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Japanese on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Japanese in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them. Integrity must be maintained between the key and the transcriptions that link here; do not change any symbol or value without establishing consensus on the talk page first. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. |
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Japanese language pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.
Examples in the charts are Japanese words transliterated according to the Hepburn romanization system.
See Japanese phonology for a more thorough discussion of the sounds of Japanese.
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See also
[edit]- Category:Pages with Japanese IPA (1,644)
Notes
[edit]- ↑ /w/ is phonetically a bilabial approximant [β̞], but it is traditionally described as a velar [ɰ] or labialized velar [w] approximant and transcribed with ⟨ɰ⟩ or ⟨w⟩.(Maekawa 2020)
- 1 2 3 4 When an affricate consonant is geminated, only the closure component of it is repeated: [kiddzɯ, eddʑi, ittsɯi, kettɕakɯ].
- 1 2 Voiced fricatives [z, ʑ] are generally pronounced as affricates [dz, dʑ] in utterance-initial positions and after the moraic nasal /N/ ([n] before [dz] and [ɲ] before [dʑ]) or the sokuon /Q/ (only in loanwords). Actual realizations of these sounds vary (see Yotsugana).
- 1 2 3 A declining number of speakers pronounce word-medial /ɡ/ as [ŋ] (Vance 2008:214). Whatever the current status of medial [ŋ] actually is, only pronunciations with it are listed in accent dictionaries and notated unambiguously with the kana カ゚・キ゚・ク゚・ケ゚・コ゚.
- 1 2 3 [ʲ] means palatalization, which involves raising the front of the tongue closer to the hard palate, in other words making the same gesture as one does to produce the vowel [i] or the consonant [j]. All consonants are palatalized before [i] and [j]. Akamatsu (1997:76–77) claims that what is transcribed in Hepburn romanization as y is merely [ʲ], but actual measurements have shown that such sequence as kya is phonetically longer than sha or ja, and is thus better transcribed as [k̟ʲj̊ä] with the segment [j] rather than [k̟ʲä] without it.[7]
- ↑ [j] is devoiced after voiceless consonants.
- ↑ Nogita, Akitsugu (2016). "Arguments that Japanese [Cj]s are complex onsets: durations of Japanese [Cj]s and Russian [Cj]s and blocking of Japanese vowel devoicing". Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle of the University of Victoria. 26 (1): 73–99.
- ↑ The utterance-final nasal is traditionally described as uvular [ɴ], but instrumental studies have found that this is inaccurate and the actual realization varies (Maekawa 2023). However, an alternative transcription has yet to be established, so ⟨ɴ⟩ is used.
- ↑ Special cases include: (1) utterance-initial positions, where in addition to the tap, the sound can be described as "a kind of weak plosive" (Akamatsu 1997), or "an affricate with short friction, [d̠ɹ̝̆]" (Okada 1999), or sometimes [l] (Labrune 2012); (2) before /i/, where [l] is a particularly common allophone (Labrune 2012) with [ɭ] also found (Labrune 2012); (3) after /N/, which is also a condition for the mentioned plosive or affricate realization (Akamatsu 1997) (Okada 1999). Akamatsu (1997) argues the lateral variants are better described as a tap [ɺ].
- ↑ The syllable-final n (moraic nasal) is pronounced as some kind of nasalized vowel before a vowel, semivowel ([j, ɰ]) or fricative ([ɸ, s, ɕ, ç, h]). [ɰ̃] is a conventional notation that is undefined for the exact place of articulation (Vance 2008:97).
- 1 2 3 Close vowels [i, ɯ] become voiceless [i̥, ɯ̥] when short and surrounded by voiceless consonants within a word. When the second consonant is [ɸ], [ç], or [h], or when both consonants are fricatives (including the second component of an affricate), devoicing is much less likely to occur (Fujimoto 2015), so vowels in such environments are not transcribed as voiceless (nor are word-final or non-close vowels, whose devoicing is also less consistent). Where close vowels that would be devoiced according to the above rules occur in succession, usually whichever vowel is accented is voiced; if neither is accented, the second is voiced (Fujimoto 2015:189): [kɯ́ɕi̥kɯmo, tsɯ̥kɯɕi]. These rules may be overridden by citing a reliable source that marks devoicing, such as NHK (2016) or Kindaichi & Akinaga (2014), if the word being transcribed appears in it.
- ↑ [ɯ], romanized u, exhibits varying degrees of rounding depending on dialect. In Tokyo dialect, it is either unrounded or compressed [ɯᵝ], meaning the sides of the lips are held together without horizontal protrusion, unlike protruded [u].
- ↑ Central allophone of /ɯ/ after an alveolar ([t, t͡s, d, n, s, d͡z, z]), palatal ([j]) or alveolo-palatal ([c̟͡ɕ, ɲ̟, ɕ, ɟ̟͡ʑ, ʑ]) consonant.
- ↑ Syllabification may be different depending on accent.
- ↑ A minor break separates two minor phrases and their accent contours.
- ↑ Placed in front of a high tone to indicate that it and subsequent high tones in this minor phrase are lower than those in the preceding minor phrase.
- ↑ Placed on the first half of a geminated stop or affricate to indicate that it is not released.
References
[edit]- Akamatsu, Tsutomu (1997), Japanese Phonetics: Theory and Practice, München: Lincom Europa, ISBN 978-3-89586-095-9
- Fujimoto, Masako (2015). "Vowel devoicing". In Kubozono, Haruo (ed.). Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology. Berlin: De Gruyter. pp. 167–214. doi:10.1515/9781614511984.167. ISBN 978-1-61451-252-3.
- Kindaichi, Haruhiko; Akinaga, Kazue, eds. (2014). 新明解日本語アクセント辞典 (in Japanese) (2nd ed.). Tokyo: Sanseido. ISBN 978-4-385-13672-1.
- Labrune, Laurence (2012), The Phonology of Japanese, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-954583-4
- Maekawa, Kikuo (2020). "Remarks on Japanese /w/". ICU Working Papers in Linguistics. 10: 45–52. doi:10.34577/00004625.
- Maekawa, Kikuo (2023). "Production of the utterance-final moraic nasal in Japanese: A real-time MRI study". Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 53 (1): 189–212. doi:10.1017/S0025100321000050.
- NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute, ed. (2016). NHK日本語発音アクセント新辞典 (in Japanese). Tokyo: NHK Publishing. ISBN 978-4-14-011345-5.
- Okada, Hideo (1999), "Japanese", in International Phonetic Association (ed.), Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Cambridge University Press, pp. 117–119, ISBN 978-0-52163751-0
- Vance, Timothy J. (2008). The Sounds of Japanese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-5216-1754-3.
