• These symbols are officially written with a tie linking them (e.g. ), and are also sometimes written as single characters (e.g. ) though the latter convention is no longer official. They are written without ligatures here to ensure correct display in all browsers.

Diacritic marks

• [Square brackets] indicate the phonetic details of the pronunciation, regardless of whether they are actually meaningful to a native speaker. This is what a foreigner who does not know the structure of a language might hear. For instance, the English word lulls is pronounced , with different el sounds at the beginning and end. This may be obvious to speakers of other languages, though a native English speaker might not believe it. Likewise, Spanish la bomba has two different b sounds to foreign ears, , though a Spaniard might not be able to hear it. Omitting such detail does not make any difference to the identity of the word.

• /Slashes/ indicate meaningful sounds called phonemes. Changing the symbols between slashes would either change the identity of the word or produce nonsense. Since there is no meaningful difference between the two el sounds in the word lulls, they need to be transcribed with the same symbol: . Similarly, Spanish la bomba is transcribed phonemically with a single b sound, . Thus a reader who is not familiar with the language in question might not know how to interpret these transcriptions.

• Either //double slashes// or |pipes| (or occasionally other conventions) show that the enclosed sounds are theoretical constructs that aren't actually heard. (This is part of morphophonology.) For instance, most phonologists argue that that the -s at the ends of verbs, which surfaces as either in talks or as in lulls , has a single underlying form. If they decide this form is an s, they would write it //s// (or |s|) to claim that phonemic and are essentially and underneath. If they were to decide it was essentially the latter, //z//, they would transcribe these words and .