Definition
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system used by linguists in order to describe the sounds of a language phonetically. Each symbol in the IPA is a one-to-one correspondence to a sound that is possible for humans to produce. For example, as Bliss et al., (to appear) describes, “the symbol [k] is used for the sound we describe as a voiceless velar stop” (p. 5). That means, that no other sound will be represented by the IPA symbol [k] other than a voiceless velar stop, regardless of the language in which it is found.
Below is a chart of commonly found consonants across the world’s languages. Place of articulation is indicated by the columns, where manner of articulation can be observed as the rows. Voiced sounds are those on the right within each cell and voiceless sounds are on the left.
Source: http://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. Source: Copyright 2018 International Phonetic Association)
Vowels also have IPA symbols and are described in terms of the tongue placement during production. Below is the vowel chart in IPA with sounds corresponding to their place of articulation.
Source: Vocal tract image adapted from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Midsagittal_diagram_unlabeled.svg. Public domain. Vowel chart image from http://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. Source: Copyright 2018 International Phonetic Association.
INLP Linguistic Glossary 
