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{{Short description|Computer-readable phonetic script}}{{Other uses|Sampa (disambiguation){{!}}Sampa}}
{{No footnotes|date=May 2018}}

The '''Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet''' ('''SAMPA''') is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable [[ASCII]] characters, based on the [[International Phonetic Alphabet]] (IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for six European languages by the [[European Economic Community|EEC]] [[European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology|ESPRIT]] information technology research and development program. As many symbols as possible have been taken over from the IPA; where this is not possible, other signs that are available are used, e.g. [<code>@</code>] for [[schwa]] (IPA {{IPA|[ə]}}), [<code>2</code>] for the vowel sound found in [[French phonology|French]] {{lang|fr|deux}} {{gloss|two}} (IPA {{IPA|[ø]}}), and [<code>9</code>] for the vowel sound found in French {{lang|fr|neuf}} {{gloss|nine}} (IPA {{IPA|[œ]}}).

The characters [<code>'''"s{mp@'''</code>] represent the pronunciation of the name SAMPA in English, with the initial symbol ["] indicating primary stress (in IPA, {{IPAc-en|'|s|æ|m|p|ə}}). Like IPA, SAMPA is usually enclosed in [[bracket|square brackets]] or [[slash (punctuation)|slashes]], which are not part of the alphabet proper and merely signify that it is phonetic as opposed to regular text.

==Languages==
Today, officially, SAMPA has been developed for all the sounds of the following languages:
{{Colbegin|colwidth=10em}}
* [[Arabic language|Arabic]]
* [[Bulgarian language|Bulgarian]]
* [[Cantonese]]
* [[Czech language|Czech]]
* [[Danish language|Danish]]
* [[Dutch language|Dutch]]
* [[English language|English]]
* [[Estonian language|Estonian]]
* [[French language|French]]
* [[German language|German]]
* [[Greek language|Greek]]
* [[Hebrew language|Hebrew]]
* [[Hungarian language|Hungarian]]
* [[Italian language|Italian]]
* [[Norwegian language|Norwegian]]
* [[Polish language|Polish]]
* [[Portuguese language|Portuguese]]
* [[Romanian language|Romanian]]
* [[Russian language|Russian]]
* [[Scots language|Scots]]
* [[Serbo-Croatian]]
* [[Slovak language|Slovak]]
* [[Slovenian language|Slovenian]]
* [[Spanish language|Spanish]]
* [[Swedish language|Swedish]]
* [[Thai language|Thai]]
* [[Turkish language|Turkish]]
{{Colend}}

==Features==
SAMPA was developed in the late 1980s in the [[European Commission]]-funded [[European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology|ESPRIT]] project 2589 "Speech Assessment Methods" (SAM)—hence "SAM Phonetic Alphabet"—in order to facilitate email data exchange and computational processing of transcriptions in phonetics and speech technology.

SAMPA is a partial [[encoding]] of the [[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]]. The first version of SAMPA was the union of the sets of phoneme codes for Danish, Dutch, English, French, German and Italian; later versions extended SAMPA to cover other European languages. Since SAMPA is based on phoneme inventories, each SAMPA table is valid only in the language it was created for. In order to make this [[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]] encoding technique universally applicable, [[X-SAMPA]] was created, which provides ''one single table'' without language-specific differences.

SAMPA was devised as a [[Hack (technology slang)|hack]] to work around the inability of [[text encoding]]s to represent IPA symbols. Consequently, as [[Unicode]] support for IPA symbols becomes more widespread, the necessity for a separate, computer-readable system for representing the IPA in ASCII decreases. However, text input relies on specific keyboard encodings or input devices. For this reason, SAMPA and X-SAMPA are still widely used<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/project-euphonias-personalized-speech.html|title=Project Euphonia's Personalized Speech Recognition for Non-Standard Speech|website=Google AI Blog|language=en|access-date=2019-08-16}}</ref>{{Better source|date=August 2019}} in computational phonetics and in speech technology.

==See also==
* [[Comparison of ASCII encodings of the International Phonetic Alphabet]]
* [[SAMPA chart]]
* [[SAMPA chart for English]], a concise version
* [[X-SAMPA]], a language-independent notation similar to SAMPA, but covering the entire IPA repertoire
* [[BABEL Speech Corpus]]

==References==
{{reflist}}
* Ranchhod, Elisabeth & J. Mamede, Nuno (2002). ''Advances in Natural Language Processing: Third International Conference, PorTAL 2002, Faro, Portugal, June 23–26, 2002. Proceedings ([[Lecture Notes in Computer Science]])''. (1st ed.). Springer. {{ISBN|3-540-43829-7}}.
* L. DeMiller, Anna & Rettig, James (2000). ''Linguistics: A Guide to the Reference Literature'' (2nd ed.). Libraries Unlimited. {{ISBN|1-56308-619-0}}.
* Lamberts, Koen & Goldstone, Rob (2004). ''Handbook of Cognition''. Sage Publications Ltd. {{ISBN|0-7619-7277-3}}.

==External links==
{{Wiktionary|SAMPA}}
* [http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/home.htm SAMPA computer readable phonetic alphabet]
* [http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english.htm Phonemic notation of English in SAMPA]
* [http://www.scots-online.org/airticles/phonetics.htm SAMPA for Scots] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030811202058/http://www.scots-online.org/airticles/phonetics.htm |date=2003-08-11 }}
* [http://familientagebuch.de/rainer/2007/38.html#4 Converter] from (German) written text to  SAMPA and IPA (Ajax-application)
* [http://www.lfsag.unito.it/ipa/converter_en.html IPA-SAMPA Converter] and [http://www.lfsag.unito.it/ipa/index_en.html IPA-SAMPA chart]

{{IPA navigation}}

[[Category:SAMPA| ]]
[[Category:1980s establishments in Europe]]
[[Category:Writing systems introduced in the 1980s]]
[[Category:1980s in computing]]