SAMPA
computer readable phonetic alphabet
SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet) is a machine-readable phonetic alphabet. It was originally developed under the ESPRIT project 1541, SAM (Speech Assessment Methods) in 1987-89 by an international group of phoneticians, and was applied in the first instance to the European Communities languages Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, and Italian (by 1989); later to Norwegian and Swedish (by 1992); and subsequently to Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish (1993). Under the BABEL project, proposals are being actively considered for extending it to Bulgarian, Estonian, Hungarian, Romanian. Under the aegis of COCOSDA it is hoped to extend it to cover many other languages (and in principle all languages). Unless and until ISO 10646/Unicode is implemented internationally, SAMPA and the proposed X-SAMPA (Extended SAMPA) constitute the best international collaborative basis for a standard machine-readable encoding of phonetic notation.
SAMPA basically consists of a mapping of symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet onto ASCII codes in the range 33..127, the 7-bit printable ASCII characters. Associated with the coding (mapping) are guidelines for the transcription of the languages to which SAMPA has been applied. Unlike other proposals for mapping the IPA onto ASCII, SAMPA is not one single author's scheme, but represents the outcome of collaboration and consultation among speech researchers in many different countries. The SAMPA transcription symbols have been developed by or in consultation with native speakers of every language to which they have been applied, but are standardized internationally.
A SAMPA transcription is designed to be uniquely parsable. As with the ordinary IPA, a string of SAMPA symbols does not require spaces between successive symbols.
SAMPA has been applied not only by the SAM partners collaborating on EUROM 1, but also in other speech research projects (e.g. BABEL, Onomastica) and by Oxford University Press.
In its basic form SAMPA was seen as catering essentially for segmental transcription, particularly of a traditional phonemic or near-phonemic kind. Prosodic notation was not adequately developed. This shortcoming has now been remedied by a proposed parallel system of prosodic notation, SAMPROSA. It is important that prosodic and segmental transcriptions be kept distinct from one another, on separate representational tiers (because certain symbols have different meanings in SAMPROSA from their meaning in SAMPA: e.g. H denotes a labial-palatal semivowel in SAMPA, but High tone in SAMPROSA).
A recent proposal for an extended version of the segmental alphabet, X-SAMPA, would extend the presently agreed conventions so as to make provision for every symbol on the Chart of the International Phonetic Association, including all diacritics. In principle this would make it possible to produce a machine-readable phonetic transcription for every known human language.
The present SAMPA recommendations (as devised for the basic six languages) are set out in the following table. All IPA symbols that coincide with lower-case letters of the Latin alphabet remain the same; all other symbols are recoded within the ASCII range 37..126. In this current WWW document the IPA symbols cannot be shown, but the columns indicate respectively a SAMPA symbol, its ASCII/ANSI number, the shape of the corresponding IPA symbol, and the symbol's meaning or use.
A 65 script a open back unrounded, Cardinal 5, Eng. start
{ 123 æ ligature near-open front unrounded, Eng. trap
6 54 turned a open schwa, Ger. besser
Q 81 turned script a open back rounded, Eng. lot
E 69 epsilon open-mid front unrounded, C3, Fr. même
@ 64 turned e schwa, Eng. banana
3 51 rev. epsilon long mid central, Eng. nurse
I 73 small cap I lax close front unrounded, Eng. kit
O 79 turned c open-mid back rounded, Eng. thought
2 50 ø close-mid front rounded, Fr. deux
9 57 oe ligature open-mid front rounded, Fr. neuf
& 38 s.c. OE lig. open front rounded
U 85 upsilon lax close back rounded, Eng. foot
} 125 barred u close central rounded, Swedish sju
V 86 turned v open-mid back unrounded, Eng. strut
Y 89 small cap Y lax [y], Ger. hübsch
B 66 beta voiced bilabial fricative, Sp. cabo C 67 ç voiceless palatal fricative, Ger. ich D 68 ð voiced dental fricative, Eng. then G 71 gamma voiced velar fricative, Sp. fuego L 76 turned y palatal lateral, It. famiglia J 74 left-tail n palatal nasal, Sp. año N 78 eng velar nasal, Eng. thing R 82 inv. s.c. R vd. uvular fric. or trill, Fr. roi S 83 esh voiceless palatoalveolar fricative, Eng. ship T 84 theta voiceless dental fricative, Eng. thin H 72 turned h labial-palatal semivowel, Fr. huit Z 90 ezh (yogh) vd. palatoalveolar fric., Eng. measure ? 63 dotless ? glottal stop, Ger. Verein, also Danish stød
: 58 colon length mark " 34 vertical stroke primary stress % 37 low vert. str. secondary stress ` 96 (see note) falling tone ' 39 (see note) rising toneNote: The SAMPA tone mark recommendations were based on the IPA as it was up to 1989-90. Since then, however, the IPA has changed its symbols for falling and rising tones. These SAMPA tone marks may now be considered obsolete, having in practice been superseded by the SAMPROSA proposals.
=n 60 inferior stroke syllabic consonant, Eng. garden O~ 126 superior tilde nasalization, Fr. bon
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Last revised 1996 08 14
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