Most of our readers are probably expecting a rant about India Pale Ale, and how it has taken over the craft-beer market, shoving aside those among us who believe that a beer is better in proportion to its opacity and blackness. But that rant will have to wait for another time. Today we are going to work ourselves up into a lather about how the International Phonetic Alphabet is racist.
To explain what we mean by that statement, it will be helpful to begin with an axiom that, while we cannot prove it (which is why we call it an axiom), corresponds to everyone’s observations: On the Internet, the victory always goes to the most pedantic.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is a useful tool for specialists. It is almost miraculously useful. It does for pronunciation what notes and staves do for music: it allows sounds to be written on paper so that they can be reproduced almost exactly by someone distant in space or time who has never heard the sounds before. What a boon for the study of dialects and obscure languages!
But, also, what an attractive nuisance for pedants!
What does it take to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet? To learn English spelling, we need twenty-six letters. But Wikipedia tells us that “as of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 segmental letters, an indefinitely large number of suprasegmental letters, 44 diacritics (not counting composites), and four extra-lexical prosodic marks in the IPA.”
Not all of those marks will be used in describing English pronunciations. But still, just trying to interpret IPA pronunciations in our own language is thoroughly daunting to the average well-educated reader. For example, how do you pronounce the word “thoroughly”? Wiktionary will tell you: “ˈθʌɹ.ə.li.” There! That was helpful, wasn’t it?
It is not the extent of the knowledge required that should outrage us, however. Or, rather, we should be outraged that pedants on the Internet think the rest of us ought to be required to learn such arcana just to gain the most basic information, but that is not the subject of our outrage today. Today we are outraged because the pedants are using the IPA wrong, and the way they are using it is fundamentally racist. It is also regionalist and classist, but right now racism is a more reliable producer of outrage.
Imagine for a moment someone who speaks a nonstandard dialect of English—and that means most of us. To pick an extreme example, let us imagine a proper Southern lady from those charmed sections of the South where people have the leisure to stretch short vowels out into triphthongs, so that she sees the word “cat” and says “CAY-ut.” Suppose, hypothetically, she knows the word “cat” but is utterly ignorant of the word “bat.” How should ”bat” be pronounced?
Our proper Southern lady’s experience will be very different depending on where she looks for the information.
She will get her answer right away if she consults most printed dictionaries: “băt.” Note this very important fact: professional lexicographers do not use the IPA to communicate with ordinary readers. If she looks at the simple pronunciation key (in many dictionaries it is printed at the bottom of every single page), our Southern reader will be able to parse the one unfamiliar mark (the breve over the “a” that indicates a short vowel) by relating it to words she already knows how to pronounce, like “cat.” She will know that “bat” is pronounced “BAY-ut.” Observe the important point that these simple pronunciation markings are dialect-agnostic. They relate unfamiliar words to familiar words, thus teaching you, the seeker of information, to pronounce the unfamiliar words in your own dialect. If you speak Black English or Brooklynese, if you are a proper Bostonian or the most improper Bostonian imaginable, if you are a Smith Islander or a dyed-in-the-black-and-gold Yinzer, you will learn how to pronounce the word in your own dialect, and you will not be told that you are wrong for pronouncing it that way.
If she consults some online source where the pedants have swept all before them and installed the International Phonetic Alphabet as the standard pronunciation guide, our Southerner will be told that “bat” is pronounced “bæt.” The unfamiliar ligature æ is not much help, especially since an educated English-speaker would pronounce it one of two or three different ways if it appeared in an old book, none of which are the pronunciation it is used to indicate in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Perhaps the pedant would argue that a truly educated English-speaker would know that the ligature æ indicated exactly this sound in Old English, to which the educated English-speaker might reply that this is a good demonstration of the difference between education and pedantry.
Having deciphered the meaning of the unfamiliar symbol, however, perhaps with the aid of a recording provided on the Web page, our proper Southern lady will not be taught how to pronounce “bat” in her own dialect. She will be taught to pronounce it the way a Midwesterner pronounces it. She may be clever enough to translate that pronunciation into her own dialect. She may even do it instinctively. But if she interprets “bæt” as describing the way a Southerner pronounces “bat,” she is wrong. The International Phonetic Alphabet exists precisely to eliminate that ambiguity and specify the exact pronunciation, and fudging it that way destroys its meaning and purpose.
The pedants who infest language sites on the Internet have taken a useful tool for specialists and pressed it into the service of racism and regionalism.
Now, they had no intention of being racists. One useful thing “critical race theory” has taught us is that most racist effects are unintentional. There are surprising numbers of flat-out bona-fide racists; and if you use a search engine like Mojeek that does not filter the results, you will find that the Internet is mostly Nazis, and you will be grateful for the filtering the other search engines do. But the Nazis are not the pedants who edit Wikipedia or Wiktionary. Those pedants would be horrified by the accusation of racism. And they are not racists by creed; it is simply that the effect of their pedantry is to disadvantage certain groups in relation to others, and in a country where race is a determiner of speech patterns, much of that disadvantage will fall on particular races.
A minority of entries in Wikipedia and Wiktionary will have more than one pronunciation indicated. For example, for “thoroughly,” we also get “(US, hurry–furry merger) IPA: /ˈθɜɹ.ə.li/,” which is useful to practically no one, since, even for the fewer than 1% of users who can interpret the IPA, it singles out one particular dialect of American English. In almost none of the entries will you find an IPA pronunciation figured for Black English, just to mention one thriving and important English dialect spoken by millions. Black English is thus cut off from the main stream of information on the Internet; it becomes a separate discipline. And separate disciplines are inherently unequal.
Now that we have worked ourselves into a good lather about the inherent racism of the wrong use of the IPA, what shall we do with our big pile of outrage? Primarily, of course, we should blanket social media with sarcastic remarks. That is the approved procedure. But after that, we could continue the cheering recent trend in which some editors in Wikipedia and similar sites have been adding simple figured pronunciations that any educated person can read. Perhaps eventually we could root out the IPA from all uses where it is not appropriate, and stuff it back into the linguists’ tool box where it belongs.