Editing Phonetic transcription (section)

== Narrow versus broad; phonemic versus phonetic<!--'Broad transcription', 'Narrow transcription', 'Phonemic transcription' redirect here--> ==
Phonetic transcription may be used to transcribe the phones of a language. In all transcription systems, there is a distinction between '''broad transcription'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> and '''narrow transcription'''. Broad transcription indicates only the most noticeable phonetic features of an utterance, whereas narrow transcription encodes more information about the phonetic details of the [[allophone]]s in the utterance. The difference between broad and narrow is a continuum, but the difference between phonemic and phonetic transcription is usually treated as a binary distinction.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Laver |first=John |title=Principles of Phonetics |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1994 |isbn=0-521-45655-X |page=550}}</ref> '''Phonemic transcription''' is a particularly broad transcription that disregards all allophonic differences (for example the differences between individual speakers or even whole dialects of the same language). Phonemic transcription provides a representation only of a language's abstract word-distinguishing units of sound ([[phoneme]]s), and thus is not really a phonetic transcription at all (though at times it may coincide with one). Instead, a '''phonetic transcription''' focuses on more exact articulatory or acoustic details, whether more broadly or narrowly. A transcription which includes some allophonic detail but is still closely linked to the phonemic structure of an utterance is called an '''allophonic transcription'''.

The advantage of narrower transcription is that it can help learners to produce exactly the right sound and allows linguists to make detailed analyses of language variation.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Ball |first=Martin |title=Phonetics: the Science of Speech |last2=Rahilly |first2=Joan |publisher=Arnold |year=1999 |isbn=0-340-70010-6 |pages=142–3}}</ref> The disadvantage is that a narrow transcription is rarely representative of all dialects or speakers of a language. Most American, Canadian, and Australian speakers of English would pronounce the {{IPA|/t/}} in the word ''little'' as a [[Flap consonant|tap]] {{IPAblink|ɾ}} and the initial {{IPA|/l/}} as a [[dark L]] (often represented as {{IPA|[ɫ]}}), but speakers in southern England pronounce the /t/ as {{IPAblink|ʔ}} (a [[glottal stop]]; see [[t-glottalization]]) and the second {{IPA|/l/}} as a vowel resembling {{IPAblink|o}} ([[L-vocalization]]). Thus, on the one hand, phonetically, ''little'' can be represented as something like {{IPA|[ˈɫɪɾɫ̩]}} in many American, Canadian, and Australian accents but {{IPA|[ˈlɪʔo]}} in a southern English accent. Furthermore, in Australian accents especially, the first-syllable vowel of ''little'' tends to be [[high vowel|higher]] than in North America, leading to the possibility of employing an even narrower phonetic transcription to indicate this, such as {{IPA|[ˈɫɪ̝ɾɫ̩]}}. On the other hand, a broad phonemic transcription of ''little'' is also possible that ignores all the above specifics of these aforementioned dialects; this can be useful in situations where minor details are not important to distinguish or where the emphasis is on overarching patterns. For example, one typical phonemic transcription for the word ''little'' is {{IPA|/ˈlɪtᵊl/}}, as is common in both British and American English dictionaries.<ref>{{cite Merriam-Webster|little}}</ref><ref>"[https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/little Little]". Collins English Dictionary. HarperCollins Publishers, 2023.</ref> (Slashes, rather than square brackets, are used to indicate phonemic rather than phonetic representations.)

A further disadvantage of narrow transcription is that it involves a large number of symbols and [[diacritics]] that may be unfamiliar to nonspecialists.{{cn|date=January 2025}} Broad transcription usually allows statements to be made which apply across accents and dialects, and is thus more appropriate for the pronunciation data in ordinary dictionaries, which may discuss phonetic details in the preface but rarely give them for each entry. Most linguists use a narrow transcription only when necessary, and at all other times use a broad transcription.