X-SAMPA, the Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet, is an ASCII-only mapping of the full IPA chart. It lets you write any IPA symbol using ordinary keyboard characters, which is useful in plain-text files and software.

Why convert IPA to X-SAMPA?

Many speech synthesis engines, phonetics databases and programming environments accept only ASCII. X-SAMPA encodes the same sounds without needing Unicode support, so the data stays portable.

How are multi-character symbols handled?

The converter matches the longest IPA token first, so tie bars, length marks and diacritics are recognised before single letters. This prevents a complex symbol from being split incorrectly.

What happens to plain ASCII letters?

Letters that are written the same in both systems, such as p, b, t, d, k, m, n, s and the basic vowels, pass through unchanged because X-SAMPA reuses those characters directly.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser using a built-in mapping table, so nothing is sent to a server.

What is the IPA to X-SAMPA Converter?

Free IPA-to-X-SAMPA converter — turn Unicode International Phonetic Alphabet symbols into ASCII X-SAMPA codes for speech tools and text files. Runs in your browser. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

IPA to X-SAMPA Converter

Name: IPA to X-SAMPA Converter
Creator: Gera Tools
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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This tool converts Unicode IPA symbols into X-SAMPA, the ASCII encoding of the International Phonetic Alphabet. X-SAMPA was designed so that every IPA character has a keyboard-typeable equivalent, making phonetic data work in plain-text files, databases, and speech-synthesis software that cannot handle Unicode.

Why X-SAMPA exists

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses hundreds of specialized Unicode characters — vowels like ə, ɪ, ʊ, consonants like ʃ, ʒ, ŋ, and diacritics that don’t exist in any standard keyboard layout. Before Unicode was universally supported, and in contexts where it still isn’t (legacy databases, certain speech synthesis engines, command-line phonetic tools, some corpus annotation formats), these characters cause encoding problems.

X-SAMPA (Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet) solves this by assigning an ASCII character or short character sequence to every symbol in the full IPA chart. The same sound system is preserved, just using characters you can type on a standard keyboard.

How the converter works

The converter scans your input left to right using a greedy longest-match algorithm: at each position it tries to match the longest known IPA sequence before falling back to shorter matches. This is necessary because IPA uses multi-character units — tie bars connecting two consonants, the length mark ː, affricates like tʃ, and diacritics — that must be recognised as a unit before trying their component characters individually.

When a match is found, the IPA token is replaced by its X-SAMPA code. Characters that are written identically in both systems — most basic consonants (p, b, t, d, k, g, m, n, f, v, s, z, h, l, r) and the basic vowels (a, e, i, o, u) — are copied through unchanged.

Common IPA to X-SAMPA mappings

IPA	X-SAMPA	Sound example
ə	@	‘a’ in ‘sofa’
ɪ	I	’i’ in ‘kit’
ʊ	U	’oo’ in ‘foot’
ɛ	E	’e’ in ‘dress’
æ	{	‘a’ in ‘trap’
ɑ	A	’a’ in ‘father’
ɔ	O	’o’ in ‘thought’
ʌ	V	’u’ in ‘strut’
ʃ	S	’sh’ in ‘ship’
ʒ	Z	’s’ in ‘measure’
ŋ	N	’ng’ in ‘sing’
ð	D	’th’ in ‘this’
θ	T	’th’ in ‘thin’
ˈ	”	Primary stress mark
ˌ	%	Secondary stress mark
ː	:	Length mark

Worked example

The IPA transcription of “hello world”: həˈloʊ wɝld

IPA:    h  ə  ˈ  l  o  ʊ     w  ɝ  l  d
X-SAMPA: h  @  "  l  o  U     w  3` l  d

Result: h@"loU w3ld`

Note how the primary stress mark ˈ becomes ", the schwa ə becomes @, and the r-colored vowel ɝ becomes `3“. The mapping is one-to-one for these symbols, so the companion X-SAMPA-to-IPA converter can reverse the process exactly. Everything runs offline in your browser.