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I receive lots of requests from students for IPA charts and information about the pronunciation of American English vowel and consonant sounds. Here is some basic information.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system that was developed to represent the sounds of spoken languages. The system uses characters from the Latin and Greek alphabets.
The symbols of the IPA include 107 letters for consonants and vowels, 52 diacritical marks, such as the cedilla in the word façade, and other symbols (such as two dots after a vowel sound) which are used to indicate sound qualities such as length, stress and intonation.
I do not have extensive knowledge of the IPA, however I do use some IPA symbols for vowel and consonant sounds in my accent reduction classes including:
the voiced th /ð/
the voiceless th /θ/
the /z/ for the voiced s
the schwa /ə/
the /æ/ vowel sound as in the word cat
If you want to see and hear all of the different vowel and consonant sounds in American English here is an audio chart from Merriam-Webster that you will find very useful.
American English Phonetic Pronunciation
Wikipedia has a detailed description of the IPA.
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