Re:The Swedish phoneme notorious for having a dedicated IPA ...
by crazygringo on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @08:08PM
(#21590491)
Nope, just gibberish to 99.9% of native speakers. BUT...
Because English is spelled non-phonetically, English learners across the world generally learn IPA together with English, to learn pronunciation.
Granted it's not the entire set of IPA sounds, and some students are better than others... but seeing as there many more speakers of English as a second language than native speakers (according to some sources, though this can be disputed), there must be at least hundreds of millions of people with a rudimentary knowledge of IPA, enough to sound out words in English.
Because English is spelled non-phonetically, English learners across the world generally learn IPA together with English, to learn pronunciation.
Granted it's not the entire set of IPA sounds, and some students are better than others... but seeing as there many more speakers of English as a second language than native speakers (according to some sources, though this can be disputed), there must be at least hundreds of millions of people with a rudimentary knowledge of IPA, enough to sound out words in English.