Most phonetic transcription is based on the assumption that linguistic sounds are segmentable into discrete units that can be represented by symbols. A rule of thumb in many linguistics contexts is therefore to use a narrow transcription when it is necessary for the point being made, but a broad transcription whenever possible. It is thus more appropriate for the pronunciation data in foreign language dictionaries, which may discuss phonetic details in the preface but rarely give them for each entry. The advantage of broad transcription is that it usually allows statements to be made which apply across a more diverse language community. ДЄ further disadvantage of narrow transcription is that it involves a larger number of symbols and diacritics that may be unfamiliar to non-specialists. While most Americans, Canadians, and Australians would pronounce the /t/ of little as a tap, many speakers in southern England would pronounce /t/ as (a glottal stop t-glottalization) and/or the second /l/ as a vowel resembling ( L-vocalization), possibly yielding. The disadvantage is that a narrow transcription is rarely representative of all speakers of a language. The advantage of the narrow transcription is that it can help learners to produce exactly the right sound and allows linguists to make detailed analyses of language variation. A transcription which includes some allophonic detail but is closely linked to the phonemic structure of an utterance is called an allophonic transcription. Phonemic transcription is a particular form of broad transcription which disregards all allophonic difference as the name implies, it is not really a phonetic transcription at all (though at times it may coincide with one), but a representation of phonemic structure. The difference between broad and narrow is a continuum, but the difference between phonemic and phonetic transcription is usually treated as a binary distinction.

Broad transcription indicates only the most noticeable phonetic features of an utterance, whereas narrow transcription encodes more information about the phonetic characteristics of the allophones in the utterance. In all systems of transcription there is a distinction between broad transcription and narrow transcription. Phonetic transcription may be used to transcribe the phones of a language. It follows that a transcription devised for one individual language or group of languages is not a phonetic transcription but an orthography. Phonetic transcription allows one to step outside orthography, examine differences in pronunciation between dialects within a given language and identify changes in pronunciation that may take place over time.ДЄ basic principle of phonetic transcription is that it should be applicable to all languages, and its symbols should denote the same phonetic properties whatever the language being transcribed. Other languages, such as Spanish and Italian have a more consistent (but still imperfect) relationship between orthography and pronunciation, while a few languages may claim to have a fully phonemic spelling system (a phonemic orthography).ДЇor most languages, phonetic transcription makes it possible to show pronunciation with something much nearer to a one-to-one relationship between sound and symbol than is possible with the language's orthography. For example, the words bough, chough, cough, though and through do not rhyme in English even though their spellings might suggest otherwise. Standard orthography in some languages, such as English and Tibetan, is often irregular and makes it difficult to predict pronunciation from spelling. Pronunciation can also vary greatly among dialects of a language. Words borrowed from other languages may retain the spelling from the original language, which may have a different system of correspondences between written symbols and speech sounds. However, their written forms ( orthography) are often not modified to take account of such changes, and do not accurately represent the pronunciation. The pronunciation of words in all languages changes over time. 3.1.1 Aspects of alphabetic transcription.

Types of transcriptions