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GUIDE TO PHONEMIC TRANSCRIPTION

Some basic principles of phonemic transcription

For this course, you need to be able to do a phonemic transcription of a short text (a few
sentences in length). When we do phonemic transcription, we are trying to capture the sound
categories that we perceive in speech. In other words, we break down words into their individual
phonemes, reflecting how our brains categorize the speech sounds we hear. Because of this,
phonemic transcription belongs to the realm of phonology: the science of how speech is
perceived and how it works structurally. We use the symbols in the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA) for this purpose. Phonemic transcriptions always start and end with slant
brackets (i.e., forward slashes) around them.1

“Phonemic transcription”
/fəˈniːmɪk tɹænˈskɹɪpʃən/

While phonetic transcription also uses the IPA, it is subtly different from phonemic
transcription in that it tries to capture all the nuances of how we articulate words. As such, it
belongs to the realm of phonetics, the articulatory science of the minute details of speech
production. Phonetic transcriptions look far more complicated than phonemic transcriptions
because they try to reflect all the tiny little details of our speech; they are transcribed on the
level of the allophone, not the level of the phoneme. Those details are not interesting to a
phonologist, though. Why would they care if a /t/ is aspirated or not? Listeners will still perceive
it as a /t/ sound either way. Phonetic transcriptions always start and end with square brackets
and feature all kinds of diacritic marks that are irrelevant for phonemic transcriptions.

“Phonetic transcription”

[fəˈnɛtsɪk̚ tɹænˈskɹɪpʃn̩]

While you need to be able to deal with phonetic transcriptions (i.e., read/understand them) on
a basic level, you do not need to know how to produce your own phonetic transcriptions for this
course; you are only required to produce phonemic transcriptions.

Spelling
For many of the world’s languages, their spelling reflects how words are pronounced quite well.
English is not one of those languages. Its orthography is hopelessly outdated, barely reflecting
modern English pronunciation, let alone variation across the various Englishes spoken in

1
Throughout this document, unless otherwise specified, the example transcriptions follow a rhotic, General
American accent model.

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different parts of the world. A well-known example of this is that you could theoretically spell
the word fish as ‘ghoti’, using the ‘gh’ in tough (so /f/), the ‘o’ in women (so /ɪ/), and the ‘ti’ in
notion (so /ʃ/): /ˈfɪʃ/. The fact that the words though, thought, and tough have wildly different
pronunciations further illustrates how ridiculous English spelling really is. There is no /k/ in the
word knowledge, so do not let spelling fool you! This means that you should refrain from
looking at the spelling of the words you are transcribing, and should really focus on how you
would perceive them if someone pronounced them.2

Which consonants and vowels to pick?

While English has many different phonemes, it by no means uses all of the symbols you can
find in the IPA. When deciding which symbols to pick from the IPA, it is a good idea to look
at the “Phonemes of English” document available on Brightspace. Identifying the correct
consonants is usually easier than identifying the right vowels, not in the least because English’s
different accents vary mostly from each other with regards to vowel quality. The lexical set
system can help you with figuring out the right vowel symbols for the accent you are
transcribing in, but note that even among speakers of reference accents like Standard Southern
British English or General American, there may be variation in the vowels they use.
An added layer of difficulty in this regard comes from the influence of your own native
language. For instance, Dutch and German learners of English often struggle with the
distinctions between the TRAP and DRESS vowels since [æ] and [ɛ] are allophones of the
Dutch/German phoneme /ɛ/ that do not distinguish meaning, whereas in English they are two
different phonemes that do distinguish meaning. The same goes for the FOOT and GOOSE vowels
(Dutch only has [ʊ] and [u] as allophones of a single phoneme: /u/). For similar reasons,
speakers of languages with a less complicated vowel system than English – for instance
Spanish, Italian, or Mandarin – the KIT and FLEECE vowels might be difficult to distinguish from
each other. If your native language does not distinguish between the consonant phonemes /l/
and /ɹ/ (e.g., Japanese), you might have a more difficult time than some of your peers when it
comes to transcribing words like lice and rice, and if your native language is known for final
devoicing (e.g., Dutch) – turning word-final voiced consonants into their voiceless counterparts
– you will likely struggle with the distinction between words like bed and bet, since they will
sound the same if you pronounce them with a Dutch accent: [ˈbɛt]. There are far too many of
these language-specific difficulties for them all to be listed here, so if you struggle with
something in particular, feel free to reach out to your instructor for additional guidance.

Stress
When we talk about stress in phonology, we are talking about emphasis. Stressed syllables are
emphasized more in our speech than unstressed syllables, something we can perceive in a
number of different ways. For example, stressed syllables are generally louder, higher in pitch,
and longer. In the word phonology, there are four syllables, but one of them is the most
prominent one: pho-NO-lo-gy. We can represent stress in our transcriptions by placing a

2
Quick sidebar: when we are talking about the IPA, we do not call the symbols ‘letters’ as we do when it comes
to orthography; we call them ‘phones’ or ‘sounds’.

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primary stress mark, which looks a little bit like an apostrophe, right in front of the syllable
that is stressed.

“Phonology”

/fəˈnɑlədʒi/

In your phonemic transcriptions, you should place that stress symbol in front of each and every
syllable that is stressed, even for monosyllabic lexical words like cat, stop and speaks: /ˈkæt/,
/ˈstɑp/, and /ˈspiːks/. This can feel a bit superfluous – obviously the only syllable in a
monosyllabic word is the one that receives stress – but we do this to distinguish monosyllabic
lexical words (which always receive stress) from monosyllabic function words (which never
receive stress unless you explicitly emphasize them). More on this later.
The type of stress discussed in the previous paragraph is called primary stress. Primary
stress is the type of stress that falls on the most prominent syllable of a word. There is another
type of stress, however: secondary stress. Secondary stress – which can be indicated by a
secondary stress mark (looks a little bit like a comma) – is reserved for syllables that are not
the most prominent in a word, but that are also not entirely unstressed. An example of that is
the /sɛ/ syllable in the word ‘separation’. It is not the word’s most prominent syllable – that
position is reserved for the penultimate syllable /ɹeɪ/ – but it is more stressed than the final and
antepenultimate syllable in the word.

“separation”

/ˌsɛpəˈɹeɪʃən/

While it is good to be aware of the existence of secondary stress and the associated secondary
stress marker, note that you do not have to include secondary stress in your phonemic
transcriptions. You are only required to note primary stress in your transcription on the exam.
Correctly transcribing stress in English involves more than simply placing a primary
stress mark before the stressed syllables, though: vowel quality and length may also be
influenced by stress or lack thereof. English is considered one of the ‘laziest’ languages in the
world because virtually always, it reduces the vowels in its unstressed syllables. So what does
vowel reduction mean? Vowel reduction means that a vowel in unstressed position will be
pronounced less extremely than it would if it were in stressed position. This can be realized in
two ways: reduction to the central vowel schwa (i.e., /ə/) or vowel shortening. When you are
transcribing and you are unsure of which vowel is in front of you, it is a good idea to check
whether the syllable in question is stressed or not. If it is unstressed, transcribing it as schwa is
almost always a good option, and if it sounds like /i/ or /u/ but is part of an unstressed syllable,

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make sure not to transcribe it with an elongation symbol behind it.3 Recall the transcription of
phonology as /fəˈnɑlədʒi/ from earlier? You will notice that the only fully realized, unreduced
vowel in that word is the one that is stressed (i.e., /nɑ/). The other syllables get either a schwa
or a short /i/ (i.e., the happY vowel, not the FLEECE vowel).
One complication when it comes to stress is that in English, monosyllabic function
words are typically unstressed in the context of a sentence. Function words include (but are
not limited to) words from the closed word classes like pronouns (e.g., I, me, he, she, his, our),
coordinators (e.g., and, but, or) subordinators (e.g., that), prepositions (e.g., from, in, of), and
auxiliary verbs (e.g., have, can, was).4 From this, it follows that function words do not receive
primary stress markers and that their vowels are typically reduced (i.e., reduced to schwa or
shortened vowels). This means that they are typically transcribed using their weak form. The
only exceptions to the rule that function words appear in their weak form are that function words
do get stress (i.e., they appear in their strong form) when you specifically emphasize them
(contrastive stress) or when they appear in sentence-final position. What makes dealing with
monosyllabic function words so difficult is that if you say them in isolation (i.e., outside of the
context of the sentence), you never reduce them in any way because then you stress/emphasize
them. When someone asks you to pronounce the word and, you will most likely say [ˈænd] with
a fully realized, stressed vowel, not [ənd] with a reduced, unstressed one. For the exam
transcription, try to keep in mind at all times that you are not transcribing words in isolation but
rather in the context of the sentence at hand. For some examples of how to transcribe function
words (underlined) in different scenarios, see the box below. Note that any word with two or
more syllables will have stress on one of these, even when it is a function word, for example
about (i.e., /əˈbaʊt/) and herself (i.e., /həɹˈsɛlf/).

Unstressed monosyllabic function words (typical scenario)

“It was a great time to be alive.”
/ɪt wəz ə ˈɡreɪt ˈtaɪm tə ˈbiː əˈlaɪv/
Stressed monosyllabic function words due to emphasis
“He didn’t speak; she spoke.”
/ˈhiː ˈdɪdənt ˈspiːk ˈʃiː ˈspoʊk/
Stressed monosyllabic function words due to sentence-final position
“Where are you from?”
/wɛɹ əɹ ju ˈfɹʌm/

3
The consequence of this is also that a syllable with a schwa or with a shortened /i/ or /u/ can never receive
stress (in English).
4
The course book for Sentence Structure (English sentence analysis; Verspoor & Sauter, 2009) provides a near-
comprehensive overview of these words at the end of chapter 5 (pp. 113-117).

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Rhoticity
If you are transcribing in a rhotic accent (e.g., American English), you do not really have to
worry about rhoticity since every ‘r’ you come across is pronounced and should hence be
transcribed. Non-rhotic accents like Standard Southern British English (SSBE), however, drop
their ‘r’-sounds whenever they are not in the rhyme of their respective syllables. Those ‘r’-
sounds may reappear as a linking ‘r’ in certain phonological contexts, though, or they appear
out of nowhere as intrusive ‘r’ because non-rhotic speakers tend to have no idea whether words
underlyingly have an ‘r’ in them to begin with. Basically, if you are transcribing in a non-rhotic
accent, transcribe any ‘r’ that you would hear if you pronounced it. Below, you can find some
examples of what to do with postvocalic ‘r’ in a non-rhotic accent.

‘R’-SOUNDS IN NON-RHOTIC ACCENTS

Rhyme-‘r’ (“It’s a nice car.”)

/ɪts ə ˈnaɪs ˈkɑː/
Linking ‘r’ (“The car is nice.”)
/ðə ˈkɑɹ ɪz ˈnaɪs/
Intrusive ‘r’ (“The llama is nice.”)
/ðə ˈlɑməɹ ɪz ˈnaɪs/

One final note about ‘r’-sounds: it does not matter whether you transcribe using the /r/-symbol
or the /ɹ/-symbol. Just make sure that you are consistent with your choice.

Punctuation
For the phonemic transcription on the exam, we do not care about any punctuation marks in the
text. In other words, you can ignore any commas, semi-colons, colons, question marks, periods,
or exclamation marks you may come across in the text. If you want, you may separate individual
sentences from each other with a vertical bar/vertical slash (i.e., the | symbol) for legibility
reasons, but this is optional. The only ‘punctuation’ you absolutely need to use is the slant
brackets at the start and end of your entire phonemic transcription (so not around every word
or around every separate sentence).

Allophonic overlap across multiple phonemes

One of the trickiest things about phonemic transcription is that some phonemes have overlap in
their allophones. In other words, while we have separate phonemes /n/, /m/, and /ŋ/, we also
know that /n/ has [n], [m], and [ŋ] as some of its allophones. So what do you do when you come
across a word that is pronounced with an [m] or an [ŋ]? How do you know whether those
particular sounds are allophones of the phoneme /n/ or of their own phonemes /m/ or /ŋ/ instead?
In difficult cases like this, we follow the following rule: transcribe those [m]-sounds and [ŋ]-

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sounds sound as their own phonemes unless you have convincing evidence that it should
really be part of a different phoneme (i.e., /n/). For a word like input, which is pronounced
with [m] because of assimilation to the place of articulation of the following phoneme /p/, you
have evidence that you are dealing with the phoneme /n/ since it is in + put: something that you
put in. The same goes for a word like income, which is pronounced with [ŋ]. Again, you have
evidence here that it should be the phoneme /n/ because it is money that comes in. However,
for the [m] in a word like imbecile or for the [ŋ] in a word like think, you have no evidence that
you are dealing with an underlying /n/-phoneme instead of the phonemes /m/ or /ŋ/ respectively.
Without such evidence, just transcribe those sounds as their own phoneme.5

“input”
/ˈɪnpʊt/
“income”
/ˈɪnkəm/
“imbecile”
/ˈɪmbəsɪl/
“think”
/ˈθɪŋk/

Allophonic compromises
As mentioned before, we are doing phonemic transcriptions in this course, meaning that in our
transcriptions, we are interested in phonemes, not in allophones. However, if you take a
hardcore phonemic approach to the transcription of grammatical affixes, you may end up with
transcriptions that have very little to do with the way we actually say words.
Grammatical affixes are morphemes like the plural ‘-(e)s’, possessive/genitive ‘-s’,
third person singular ‘-(e)s’, and past tense ‘-ed’ suffixes that you add at the end of a word
to have it fit the grammar of your sentence. The former two affixes are realized by the phoneme
/s/; the latter by the phoneme /d/. These phonemes have different allophones depending on
whether the sound they get attached to is voiced or not: cats gets the voiceless [s]-allophone
because the final consonant in cat is voiceless (i.e., /t/), whereas dogs gets the [z]-allophone
because the final consonant of dog is voiced (i.e., /ɡ/). You see the same pattern for the third
person singular /s/-phoneme, the possessive /s/-phoneme, and the past tense /d/-phoneme.
However, if the sound they get attached to is identical – for instance, if you try to slap the plural

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In words like incapability, it is not entirely clear whether we are dealing with /n/ or /ŋ/. Sure, attaching the ‘in-’
prefix to the word capable makes it mean the opposite, but it is also not capability that comes in as we saw for
words like income and input. If you come across a word like this, you are free to choose either /n/ or /ŋ/; both
will be assessed as correct.

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/s/-phoneme onto a word that already ends with /s/ (e.g., bus) or the past tense /d/-phoneme
onto a verb that already ends with /d/ (e.g., wed) – a schwa gets added in between the stem of
the word and the attached suffix: [ˈbʌsəz] and [ˈwɛdəd].
From this, a problem arises for our otherwise pretty hardcore phonemic transcription,
since that approach would have resulted in something like /ˈbʌss/ and /ˈwɛdd/. For one, we
cannot really transcribe the same sound twice within a single word consecutively. Moreover,
since we have not added the allophonic schwa to our transcription, we are not capturing the fact
that the respective words now have two syllables now rather than just one. For this reason, we
make a compromise: we do not transcribe grammatical affixes purely phonemically because
that could potentially result in highly awkward transcriptions every time we come across
anything that has been conjugated. Instead, we transcribe grammatical affixes in such a way
that our transcriptions reflect their voicing assimilation and the possible insertion of
schwa. In the overview below, you see examples of this compromise in action, with the
awkward options crossed out.

Plural ‘-(e)s’ 3rd person sing. ‘-(e)s’ Past tense ‘-ed’

“cat + s” “cat + s” “work + ed”

/ˈkæts/ /ˈhɪts/ /ˈwɜɹkd/ /ˈwɜɹkt/
“dog + s” “dog + s” “beg(g) + ed”
/ˈdɑɡs/ /ˈdɑɡz/ /ˈbɛɡs/ /ˈbɛɡz/ /ˈbeɡd/
“bus + es” “bus + es” “wed(d) + ed”
/ˈbʌss/ /ˈbʌsəz/ /ˈkɪss/ /ˈkɪsəz/ /ˈwɛdd/ /ˈwɛdəd/

Final piece of advice

This may not come as a surprise to you, but the key to success when it comes to phonemic
transcription is practice. The more transcriptions you do, the better you will get. It is that simple.
Take your time with it, analyze your mistakes and learn from them, and you will do fine on the
exam. Good luck!