Editing X-SAMPA (section)

{{Short description|Remapping of the IPA into ASCII}}
{{More citations needed|date=March 2016}}
{{IPA notice}}
The '''Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet''' ('''X-SAMPA''') is a variant of [[SAMPA]] developed in 1995 by [[John C. Wells]], professor of [[phonetics]] at [[University College London]].<ref name="SAMPA-PDF">{{cite web|last1=Wells|first1=J.C.|title=Computer-coding the IPA: a proposed extension of SAMPA|url=https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/ipasam-x.pdf|website=UCL Phonetics and Linguistics|publisher=University College London|access-date=16 March 2016}}</ref> It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the 1993 version of [[International Phonetic Alphabet]] (IPA). The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit [[ASCII]].

SAMPA was devised as a [[Kludge#Computer science|hack]] to work around the inability of [[text encoding]]s to represent IPA symbols. Later, as [[Unicode]] support for IPA symbols became more widespread, the necessity for a separate, computer-readable system for representing the IPA in ASCII decreased. However, X-SAMPA is still useful as the basis for an [[input method]] for true IPA.