Update: This post may be four years old, but the information in it is all up-to-date, and even OS X 10.7 “Lion” compatible. Enjoy!

As a linguist, you find yourself using the [[International Phonetic Alphabet]] (IPA) incredibly frequently. Some of the characters are easy enough to use without any special work (ŋ, ə). However, to get the more cool/obscure characters and diacritics, or to stack diacritics (placing, for instance, a tone marking above a nasal marking), you need special fonts, layouts and setup. In this post, I’m going to explain, as simply as possible, how to go about finding the files and setting this up, all without paying a dime for specialty software.

Getting the fonts and layout

The beauty of this method is that it uses software built into Mac OS X, and that you can use IPA fonts in any application that supports Unicode (translation: lots of them), not just specific programs. You also don’t need to install a separate program to clutter up your computer, just a few free fonts and a keyboard layout. So, here’s your freeware shopping list:

Necessary files:
1. Charis SIL IPA Font – The best free IPA font out there (in my opinion) because it has bold, italic, and all sorts of other characters outside of IPA. The download link is around halfway down the page, grab the file with “(Windows, Macintosh and Linux)” next to it. Thanks to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, it’s completely free!
2.An IPA Keyboard Layout for OS X – SIL has created two versions. There’s a more comprehensive and modern version with every key you can imagine and more at The IPA-SIL key layout site. However, I use the Version 0.6 Alpha, not the more recent one on the above page. Although the more recent one works very well, it’s just a bit more complex. The instructions here are for the older, alpha version, which is no longer available through SIL and which I’ve hosted with documentation here: IPA-SIL Keyboard Layout Version 0.6 Alpha). Both layouts say that they’re specific to Doulos SIL, but I’ve successfully used both with the Charis SIL font, so don’t worry.

Optional Files
Doulos SIL – A differently styled IPA font from SIL, missing the bold and italic forms that Charis has. Still free :)
SILIPA93 Fonts – These are desperately outdated, but occasionally necessary when reading other people’s old IPA.

Download at least the CharisSIL and the Keyboard layout, save them to your desktop (or a location of your choosing), and then proceed to the next step.

Power User’s Summary: Download CharisSIL and an IPA-SIL keyboard Layout from the above links

Installing the font

Now, double-click the CharisSIL(version).zip file that you saved to your desktop. It’ll unzip into a similarly named folder on your desktop. Take the CharisSILfontdocumentation.pdf file and move it to a safe place, it’s a handy guide to have around, and feel free to take a look at the readme and license files in the folder.

Now, if you want to install this font for yourself and every other user on your computer, place the four font files from the folder (CharisSILB.ttf, CharisSILBI.ttf, CharisSILI.ttf, CharisSILR.ttf) along with any other fonts you’re installing into the /Library/Fonts folder. You’ll need to give an administrator password to install them into that folder.

To install for yourself alone, do the same as above, except by copying things into /Users/yourname/Library/Fonts. No admin access needed for this route.

Power User’s Summary: Install the font files in either /Library/Fonts or /Users/you/Library/Fonts

Installing the layout

Double click “IPA-SIL keyboard(version).dmg” on your desktop. Now click the newly opened “IPA-SIL Keyboard” Disk Image on the desktop and examine the contents.

The very first step is to save IPA-SIL.pdf! In fact, frame it. Wallpaper your wall with copies of it. Get a version tattooed on your chest. Just make sure you have it. Without this, you’ll have trouble figuring out exactly which keypresses result in which characters, and this method won’t work very well at all.

Now, drag BOTH IPA-SIL.icns and IPA-SIL.keylayout into /Users/yourname/Library/Keyboard Layouts. Also, you might have to create the …/yourname/Library/Keyboard Layouts folder if you’re installing for yourself only.

If you’re using OS X 10.7 “Lion”, Apple has hidden the /Users/yourname/Library (~/Library) folder from you by default, so in order to install the keyboard layout, you’ll need to unhide the ~/Library folder or to access it using the Finder’s “Go to folder” option. To do the latter, just open the finder, open the Go menu in the menubar, then choose “Go to Folder…”, then type in ~/Library.

Once you’ve placed the files in the right folder, restart your computer.

Power User’s Summary: Save IPA-SIL.pdf. Drag BOTH IPA-SIL.icns and IPA-SIL.keylayout into /Users/yourname/Library/Keyboard Layouts. Restart.

Final Configuration

Once you’ve restarted, go to the System Preferences Application. Click the ‘International’ preference pane (Renamed “Language and Text” for Snow Leopard), then, click the “Input Menu” tab inside the International Pane, and you’ll be presented with a window like this:

intl.jpg

In this window, make sure and select “Keyboard Viewer” (to see what symbols are where at a glance), “Allow a different input source for each document”, and “Show input menu in menu bar”. Also, feel free to change the shortcut to switch input methods to make things faster for you down the road.

Now, use the scroll bar to scroll through the list of options until you finally see “IPA-SIL”, and select it. It’s right below the Eskimo languages. See below:

intlipa.jpg

Now that you’ve done that, you should have a little American flag (which regrettably cannot be changed, even if you’re using a US keyboard outside of the US) in your menu bar. Congratulations! You’re now set up to use the IPA on your mac.

hɛloʊ wɜɹld!

To test it out, fire up any text editor (OpenOffice, TextEdit, my personal favorite, Mellel, or even MS Word, if you insist) and open a document. Be very sure to select Charis SIL for your font in the document.

Now, click the little menu in the menubar and select IPA-SIL:
ipamenu.jpg

Start typing and you’ll find yourself typing IPA symbols! You’ll slowly learn the reasonably intuitive set of keypresses (e.g: Shift+N = Angma, Shift+R = Alveolar Tap), and soon, you’ll be typing in IPA nearly effortlessly in nearly any application. You can even IM your linguist friends in IPA if they have the font as well.

The best part? Thanks to these free and open source fonts and layouts, you’ll never need to write a Word macro again on OS X. oʊ, wəɾə wʌndɛrfl wɜɹld!

EDIT: I’ve heard that sometimes, Word doesn’t play nicely with this sort of input method. I’d highly recommend that if you have troubles, you try using TextEdit (built in), Mellel, or the free Office suites for OS X, OpenOffice and NeoOffice, all of which I’ve tried and know to work well.

At the very least, you should be able to copy/paste your IPA text into a word document, or hopefully even make the switch entirely to a better word processor. Although MS Word may be the most well known word processor, it’s far from being the best on OS X, and I highly encourage you to check out all the options.

Tagged with Computers and Software, Conventional Linguistics, Phonetics and Phonology | 76 Comments


A few weeks ago, in my gigantic post on the beauty of Phonetics, I mentioned a particular sound, called the Velar Nasal (ŋ). Well, I think the Velar Nasal is really cool, and I also want to show how much detail can go into the study of something as seemingly simple as a single sound. It’s fascinating to see how complicated something we take for granted can be. As such, I’m going to designate it as this post’s Phonetic Phriend.

A Phoundation in Phonetics

Every consonant sound we make can be described by describing the positions of the various parts of the mouth involved in speech production (“articulators”). There are five main articulatory parts that must be described for every sound:

  1. The front of the tongue – Where is it? Is it pressed against the upper part of the mouth? Where’s the closure? Is it completely closed?
  2. The back of the tongue – Just like the front, Is it pressed against the upper part of the mouth? Against the back of the throat? Where’s the closure? Is it completely closed?
  3. The lips – Are they open? Closed? Round?
  4. The velum – This is the movable bit that closes off your nose from your throat. If you look in a mirror and say “Aaaaa”, you’ll see a little dangling bit (your uvula) hanging from the roof of your mouth. The uvula is attached to the velum. When raised, the velum stops air from escaping out your nose, and when lowered, air can flow freely out your nose.
  5. The vocal folds (also known as the vocal cords) – In English, they’re either vibrating or not. In other languages, there are different ways of using them

If you know these five things about a sound, you can identify it, reproduce it (given practice), and determine the proper IPA symbol for it.

A Nasal by any other name

Let’s try making it for a second. Say “Ring”, and hold the final sound. Note that we don’t say rin-g, it’s just “ring”. There’s no real “g” to it. When you hold that sound, you’ll feel air going out your nose, just like when you hold an “N”, and you’ll feel your tongue pressed against the back of the roof of your mouth.

The name itself is descriptive: It’s called a “velar nasal”, which lets you know that the tongue is pressed against the velum, and that air is escaping out your nose, instead of through your mouth. Also called “Angma” or “Eng”, the Velar Nasal is fairly common in languages of the world. It’s the sound found in the English words “ring“, “sang“, “ankle” and “think”. The IPA symbol for the Velar Nasal is ŋ, or, in a more conventional IPA font:
angma

Here’s a cross-section of the head (“sagittal section”) of somebody making a velar nasal (created with this very cool sagittal section maker):
Sagittal section of a Velar Nasal

Using the 5-place method of describing sounds, we could describe the velar nasal as follows:

  1. The front of the tongue – Lowered, and not involved.
  2. The back of the tongue – Pressed up against the velum, forming a complete seal
  3. The lips – Not involved in the articulation, but likely open to begin the next sound.
  4. The velum – Lowered so that air can pass out from your nose
  5. The vocal folds – Vibrating

What’s so cool about the Velar Nasal?

You now know, in excruciating detail, how one goes about making one, but you might still be asking what makes them so cool?

First, many English speakers don’t even know that the sound is its own sound. Sure, they can tell the difference between “win” and “wing”, and they know it’s not quite right to pronounce the G and say “win-guh”, but for most English speakers, it never crosses our minds to think about it as its own sound, just as unique as a “K” or an “M”.

Second, in English, it’s a wonderful example of what Linguists call “Assimilation”. First, say “thin”. Stop at the “N” and pay attention to your tongue. It’s further forward in your mouth, almost behind your teeth. Now, say the phrase “I saw the thin kids” quickly. Now, do it again and stop right at the “n”. Notice that this time, your tongue is back in the mouth, and you’re making a velar nasal. Now, the N in thin is clearly a normal (“alveolar”) nasal when alone, but when it’s before a velar consonant, “K”, it becomes a velar nasal. This is because we’re generally quite lazy, and would rather make two sounds in the same part of the mouth than make two in two different places. This happens in lots of languages in lots of places, and especially with nasal sounds.

Finally, it’s interesting because of its distribution in English. We can make a “T” sound anywhere in a word. We can say “Tab”, “bat”, and “baton”. That’s not that case with the Velar Nasal. We can put it at the end of a word or phrase (“king”), or in the middle (“singing”), but try and say “ngo”. As a native English speaker, it’s easy to say “en-go”, but not “ŋo”. I’ve had to train myself to be able to make these at the start of words, because English never taught me how and they’re used at the start of words in lots of languages around the world. So, just because we can say something at the end of a word doesn’t mean we’re able to start a word with it.

So, reader, meet Velar Nasal. Velar Nasal, meet reader. Hopefully you’re now phast phonetic phriends, and will be on the lookout for them wherever they may lie. You might not thiŋk so, but they’re always haŋiŋ around, waitiŋ for a liŋɡuist to pick up on them. Fascinatiŋ, ŋo?

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Phonetic Phriends, Phonetics and Phonology | 6 Comments


Hello everybody! Sorry for the recent lack of posts, it’s been a very crazy few days. I just wanted to pass along a pair of pictures which I think provide some great perspective.

We’re raised and taught that South America is generally a Spanish-speaking area, with Brazil as the Portuguese-speaking exception, and then a few other official languages. South American official languages could be mapped like this:

langs.gif

However, those are just the languages which were promoted with colonization. In reality, there are hundreds of languages and language families which developed and flourished in South America, some of which survive even today. So, if we were to redact just a small part of that map to show past and present native languages, it would look more like this (courtesy the Athena review language archive):

natlangs.gif

Impressive, isn’t it?

Many of these original languages are dying, but there are still tens of thousands (at least) of monolingual speakers of these native languages. So, yes, many Brazilians speak Portuguese. Many Colombians speak Spanish. However, not everybody in those countries speaks these main languages, and, well, those who don’t were there first.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Change, Linguistic Anthropology | Leave a Comment

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