This key accommodates standard General American, Received Pronunciation, Canadian English, South African English, Australian English, and New Zealand English pronunciations. Therefore, not all of the distinctions shown here will be relevant to your dialect. If, for example, you pronounce cot /ˈkɒt/ and caught /ˈkɔːt/ the same, you can simply ignore the difference between the symbols /ɒ/ and /ɔː/, just as you ignore the distinction between the written vowels o and au when pronouncing them.
In many dialects /r/ occurs only before a vowel; if you speak such a dialect, simply ignore /r/ in the pronunciation guides where you would not pronounce it, as in cart /ˈkɑrt/. In other dialects, /j/ (a y sound) cannot occur after /t/, /d/, /n/ etc. in the same syllable; if you speak such a dialect, ignore the /j/ in transcriptions such as new /njuː/.
For example, New York is transcribed /njuː ˈjɔrk/. For most people from England, and for some New Yorkers, the /r/ in /ˈjɔrk/ is not pronounced and can be ignored; for most people from the US, including some New Yorkers, the /j/ in /njuː/ is not pronounced and can be ignored.
On the other hand, there are some distinctions which you might make but which this key does not encode, as they are seldom reflected in the dictionaries used as sources for Wikipedia articles. Examples include the difference between the vowels of fir, fur and fern in Scottish and Irish English, the vowels of bad and had in many parts of Australia and the Eastern United States, and the vowels of spider and spied her in some parts of Scotland and North America.
Other words may have different vowels depending on the speaker. Bath, for example, originally had the /æ/ vowel of cat, but for many speakers it now has the /ɑː/ vowel of father. Such words are transcribed twice, once for each pronunciation: /ˈbæθ, ˈbɑːθ/.
The IPA stress mark (ˈ) comes before the syllable that has the stress, in contrast to stress marking in pronunciation keys of some dictionaries published in the United States. |