The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has been developed since 1886 by the International Phonetic Association and standardizes the set of symbols for representation of sounds in written form for almost all world languages. Primarily, IPA was developed based on the Roman alphabet, but then it contains some letters and additional symbols from other scripts.

Each IPA symbol consists of one or more elements (letters, diacritics and prosody marks) and is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are distinctive (characteristics that show the significant differences between sounds) in spoken language, such as phonemes, intonations, separation of word and syllables. IPA does not define symbols describing information such as clicks, pops, gnashing of teeth; spoken rapidly or lisping; transcription of atypical speech, but there are extensions to IPA symbols that cover the transcription of such sounds.

IPA is widely used in all areas where the analysis of the oral speech is focused on lexicography, linguistics, translation, speech-language pathology.