How to use IPA transaction symbols The International Phonetic Association (IPA) has list of symbols used to represent all the various sounds in human languages. This is called the International Phonetic Alphabet, and a reference copy is available from www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA.

To hear which symbols corresponds to which sounds, you can use the handy interactive chart produced by York University (Toronto, Canada): www.yorku./earmstro/ipa. This chart requires Flash Player: www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer.

There are a number of ways to use IPA symbols in your own work...

If you are in the university computer labs, in Microsoft Word XP use the font 'Arial MS'. To find individual IPA symbols, click 'Insert' in the menu bar at the top, then 'Symbol...'. In the 'Symbol' window that comes up, click on the 'Subset' menu in the top right of the window, and select 'IPA Extensions'.

If you have Microsoft Office XP installed on your home computer, the Arial Unicode MS font may not have been automatically installed on your computer with the original installation of Office. Microsoft have a guide to installing Arial Unicode MS from your Office CD: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287247.

If you are using a different word processing package (.g. the free and fully functional ‘OpenOffice’ package: www.openoffice.org), and/or an operating system other than Windows, you can use the DoulosSIL IPA font package, available for free download from http://scripts.sil.org/DoulosSILfont.

Download the font to a directory of your choice, then install the font using one of the following steps In Windows, follow the Microsoft guide to installing fonts. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314960. During this procedure, navigate to the directory where you downloaded the font, and select the file DoulosSILR.ttf.

 In Mac OS 7, 8 or 9, use this guide: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=8379. In Mac OS 10.3, use this guide: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=151832 [link no longer active].

 In Mac OSX, information about the ‘Font Book’ is here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/what- is/

 In Gentium/Linux, see the SIL guide at http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium_linux.