Forgotten Realms Wiki:Help-Pronunciation guides

This wiki uses both the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and a version of phonetic re-spellings of the English language as a guide to readers how to pronounce various proper names and terms of the Forgotten Realms.

Local Accent
The pronunciations of words depend, of course, on local accent. This wiki follows the officially published sourcebooks and provides American accents, just as it uses American spellings. This does not imply that the speakers of Common in the Realms spoke with an American accent! Common itself had numerous accents and there are many acceptable variations on any given word. We cannot possibly provide all variations on this wiki.

Sources for Official Pronunciations
An article by Frank Mentzer entitled "Ay pronunseeAYshun gyd" was published in Dragon issue 93. This article serves as the basis for many of the pronunciations provided across this wiki, and also influenced our selection of "Accepted English Phonetic Spellings" listed in the table to the right.

Several sourcebooks published over the years have also included pronunciations particular to the Realms, including but not limited to:
 * The Forgotten Realms Campaign Set
 * Faiths & Avatars
 * Demihuman Deities
 * Faiths and Pantheons
 * Ed Greenwood Presents Elminster's Forgotten Realms

IPA
The International Phonetic Alphabet was designed to help express the sounds possible with any human language unambiguously. We only use a tiny portion of it on this wiki to approximate the English sounds of terms related to the Realms.

Sounds spelled out in IPA are surrounded by slashes. A  mark indicates that the next syllable should receive primary emphasis, while a   mark means that the next syllable should receive secondary emphasis. Other syllable divisions are not typically marked.

Some of the letters used in IPA match those in English, but many, especially those used for vowels, are not from English but some other language. Some are unique to IPA altogether. Be careful! Some letters, e.g., /j/ mean a completely different sound in IPA than they do in English.

The table to the right lists all of the IPA symbols that you may see on this wiki with common D&D words as examples of those sounds.

Phonetic Re-spellings
Not everyone is familiar with IPA, as it essentially requires learning an entirely new alphabet, so our wiki provides a second means of understanding how a word is pronounced, by "re-spelling" the word phonetically with less ambiguous spellings, using English letters only (with two exceptions, discussed below). This is the method commonly used by the sourcebooks, some of which are listed above. However, not all authors will re-spell a word in the same way. Partly, this is caused by the different accents and manners in which various authors pronounce words, but it is also because there is not a single, formalized method of re-spelling. The table to the right lists many commonly used re-spellings for the various sounds in the English language, but it may not cover all the ways an author might use to re-spell a word.

In phonetic re-spellings, syllables are italicized and separated by hyphens (-). Syllables that are accented are written in all capital letters.

There are at least two sounds in the English language that require use of additional letters not found in the English alphabet, if ambiguity is to be avoided; these are ash ("Æ,æ") and schwa ("ə"). Schwa is sometimes approximated as "uh"&mdash;and this can be seen in many re-spellings on this wiki&mdash;but ash, more common in American English, is needed to distinguish the "a" in "dragon" from the one in, for example, "bard". "Ae" cannot be used, because some words may have the sounds of /a/ and /e/ together or some other diphthong that could be spelled "ae" in English.

How to Add Pronunciation Guides to Articles
The Pronounce template is designed to assist editors in adding new pronunciation guides to articles and to ensure that we have a standard way of indicating pronunciation across the wiki. The template documentation details how to use all of its features, including several examples. Generation of the IPA pronunciation is automatic; the template only requires that each word be broken down into syllables selected from the table provided both here on this page and with the template documentation.

To add an audio clip requires recording a short clip with software of your choice as an  file and then uploading the file to the wiki in the same manner that you would upload an image. Use the Information/Audio to provide information about the audio file. The filled-in template might look like this:

After the audio file has been uploaded, the filename can be provided as an  parameter to Pronounce.