Learn the International Phonetic Alphabet
in a few easy steps.

naYana is a friendlier way to read, type, and write the IPA. Not a new standard — just a writing system that lets you use IPA without years of phonetics training. v0.1 is naYana for English.

Start the tutorial Read the manifesto
θɪŋk

Learn

A short, structured tour through the IPA — vowel by vowel, consonant by consonant. Each lesson introduces a few characters and shows them in real English words.
qe → æ

Type

An IPA keyboard that just works. Type English-style shortcuts and they become real IPA codepoints — searchable, copyable, compatible with any IPA-aware tool.
ðə bɝd

Read

Curated passages in naYana spelling, with English alongside. Try reading a paragraph and you'll surprise yourself with how much you already know.
naYana

Manifesto

Why this exists: English spelling is the largest unacknowledged tax on human attention. An essay that performs its own argument — the page itself reforms as you read.
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Download

Install the naYana font on your own machine to read IPA-spelled content in any application that supports Unicode. Free, OFL-licensed.
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FAQ

Why phonetic spelling? Why English first? What about other languages and varieties? Where does this go from here?

What is naYana, exactly?

naYana is two things working together: a font that draws the glyphs of the International Phonetic Alphabet in a friendly, hand-drawn style, and a small engine that rewrites English text using grapheme-to-phoneme alignment from CMUdict.

The underlying spelling uses canonical IPA Unicode codepoints — the same ones a phonetics textbook or a text-to-speech engine would use. So anything you read in naYana is, technically, IPA. The difference is that you can already read most of it, because most characters are letters you already know, with one or two design touches.

A handful of IPA-specific characters (ə ʌ ɪ ʊ ɛ ɔ ð θ ʃ ʒ ŋ ɝ ɚ ː) replace the spellings English uses to paper over its inconsistency. Five minutes with the tutorial and they stop looking strange.

Preview note. v0.1 is functional but unfinished. Audio playback (hear what you type / read) lands in v0.2 — the underlying pipeline already works, we're tuning voice quality before exposing it. For now, the focus is on reading, typing, and understanding the script.

How it looks (one example)

The opening line of the manifesto, in three scripts:

English

Reading is the most concentrated form of attention humans regularly perform.

IPA (in any IPA font)

ˈriːdɪŋ ɪz ðə moʊst ˈkɑnsənˌtreɪtɪd fɔrm əv əˈtɛnʃən ˈhjumənz ˈrɛɡjələrli pərˈfɔrm.

naYana — same IPA codepoints, drawn in the naYana font

riːdɪŋ ɪz ðə moust kɑːnsəntreitəd fɔːrm əv ətɛnʃən hyuːmənz rɛgyələrliː pɚfɔːrm.

Start the 9-step tutorial →