SAMPA
Universität Bielefeld - Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft

SAMPA
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Definitions and Information



SAMPA, the SAM Phonetic Alphabet, was first developed in the late 1980s in the SAM project (Speech Assessment Methods, ESPRIT 2589) in a cooperative effort by over 20 phonetics and acoustics laboratories in Europe, initiated and coordinated by John Wells, University College London. SAMPA is an ASCII encoding of the phonemes of particular languages, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and a given SAMPA application thus depends on three choices:
  1. Choice of a phonemic analysis for the language concerned,
  2. Choice of IPA symbol(s) for each phoneme,
  3. Choice of ASCII code for IPA symbols (which are represented by standard ASCII characters).
The general SAMPA definitions map IPA symbols to ASCII codes, while the SAMPA applications to specific languages additionally presuppose a specific phonemic analysis. Consequently, while agreeing on the IPA to ASCII mapping, it is possible to make different choices of phonemic analyses for different languages, and thus define different SAMPA representations. Since its first application to 7 European languages, SAMPA has been applied to a wide range of languages, with modifications and extensions suggested for reasons which have arisen from practical use in speech technology and spoken language lexicography. Most recently, John Wells has extended SAMPA to cover the entire International Phonetic Alphabet, and Dafydd Gibbon has introduced extensions for morphological boundary marking.

SAMPA summary brochure, mainly from Bielefeld pages:
PostScript (gzipped, 206123 Bytes)
General SAMPA index:
University College London
SAMPA extensions to full IPA:
J.C. Wells, University College London
SAMPA-D-VMlex:
Definition of the extended German SAMPA lexical transcription system (VERBMOBIL lexical database)
Dafydd Gibbon, U, Bielefeld
Other links:
Linguistics
Phonetics and Speech Technology
Dafydd Gibbon: 29.11.95