Wikipedia:WikiProject Linguistics/Guidelines

Wikipedia has a number of conventions relating to linguistics.

IPA
Wikipedia uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to transcribe pronunciation. There are a number of policies regarding the use of IPA.

Wikipedia has IPA help keys for many languages. When adding pronunciations to articles, use the symbols in these help keys. For instance, use symbols from Help:IPA/Russian when inserting a Russian pronunciation into an article like Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

IPA transcriptions have varying amounts of detail. Phonemic transcriptions are the least detailed, and phonetic transcriptions are more detailed. Phonemic and phonetic transcriptions are enclosed in different parentheses.

Bracketing
Phonemic transcriptions are enclosed in slashes, and phonetic transcriptions are enclosed in square brackets. Examples of orthography or spelling are enclosed in angle brackets. If a word in the Latin alphabet is mentioned without special reference to its orthography, it is given in italics.


 * The digraph $⟨th⟩$ in English represents two phonemes: the voiceless dental fricative, as in thigh, and the voiced dental fricative, as in thy.
 * The letter $⟨t⟩$ represents the phoneme, which is usually pronounced as an alveolar stop . However, through t-glottalization, is pronounced as a glottal stop in what  and butter.

Non-Latin writing systems are not italicized, and translations or glosses are enclosed in quotes.
 * Plato (Ancient Greek Πλάτων) was a nickname from the adjective πλατύς, which means "broad".
 * Belgorod (Белгород) means "white city", and comes from белый (bely "white") and город (gorod "city").
 * The name Beijing (北京) means "Northern Capital", from běi (北) "north" and jīng (京) "capital".

Templates
Words in a foreign language, transliterations, and IPA pronunciations should be styled with templates like lang, script, transl, and IPA. Adding these templates will help ensure that non-Latin alphabets display correctly, and allow users to style specific languages and alphabets with CSS attributes in their common.css.

lang is used to mark the language that an example letter, word, or text is in. Find the ISO 639-1, ISO 639-2, or ISO 639-3 code for the language and insert it as the first parameter in the template, and then place the letter, word, or text as the second parameter. Language templates with a hyphen provide a language name before the foreign-language text, such as, which gives Arabic:. When a language name is not needed, use the basic template instead:.

IPA pronunciations should always be placed inside an IPA template. In most cases the basic template, IPA, should be used.

Pronunciations of article names should use IPA, which provides links to language-specific IPA help pages. The templates IPAc-en for English, and IPAc-cmn for Mandarin Chinese, take each IPA symbol as a separate parameter, or convert X-SAMPA and Pinyin to IPA. In the simple IPA template, the first parameter is the ISO 639 language code, the second is the IPA transcription, the third determines the text that appears before the transcription, and the fourth is the name of an audio file.

Historical linguistics
Certain conventions apply in articles on historical linguistics. The notation x > y means "x developed into y", and y < x means "y developed from x". Abbreviations are used for language names; some common ones are PIE, PG, and OE for Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, and Old English. The asterisk
 * marks sounds or words that are not attested in writing, but reconstructed from linguistic evidence: PG > OE æ means "The Proto-Germanic reconstructed phoneme a became æ in Old English."