37.3590, Software: Fonology

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3590. Mon 02 Nov 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3590, Software: Fonology

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Date: 01-Nov-2026
From: Guilherme D. Garcia [guilherme.garcia at lli.ulaval.ca]
Subject: Fonology


Fonology is an R package for phonological research and teaching.
text2IPA is a free web app, built on the package, for people who do
not use R. Fonology (https://gdgarcia.ca/fonology) provides:
- Broad IPA transcription with syllabification and stress for English,
French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, plus narrow transcription for
Portuguese
- Conversion between phonemes and distinctive features, using a
built-in or custom inventory
- Syllable constituents, weight and stress position
- MaxEnt grammars and Noisy Harmonic Grammar simulations
- Sonority dispersion and sonority plots
- Portuguese bigram probabilities and nonce word generation
- Vowel trapezoids, and IPA conversion for LaTeX and Typst
Transcription uses lexical lookup first and a rule-based fallback for
other words. Users can add their own lexicon entries. Estimated
accuracy on running text is about 99% for English and Spanish, 97-99%
for French, 96% for Portuguese and 94-96% for Italian. These estimates
assume that lexicon entries are correct and combine lexicon coverage
of running text with fallback accuracy. Fallback accuracy is the rate
of exact matches with the dictionary transcription, including stress
and syllabification, on random samples of lexicon words: 95% for
Portuguese and Spanish, 70% for French, 68% for Italian and 27% for
English. The lexicon covers about 28% of running-text tokens in
Portuguese, so most Portuguese tokens depend on the fallback. Fallback
is thus most accurate exactly when it's most needed.
The package requires R 4.1 or later. To install it, run
pak::pak("guilhermegarcia/fonology").
text2IPA (https://ipa.gdgarcia.ca) transcribes pasted text or a UTF-8
.txt file and produces tables of phonological variables, which can be
downloaded as CSV. Rule-based transcriptions are marked with an
asterisk.
Files can be up to 5 MB or 250,000 cleaned tokens; larger files should
be analyzed with the R package. The app runs in Chrome, Firefox, Edge
or Safari 16.4+, with nothing to install. Text and files stay on the
user's device. The app collects anonymous usage counts, but no text,
transcriptions or file names.
License: Fonology is released under the MIT License. Its lexica
include CC BY-SA data from Lexique 4 and Wiktionary. text2IPA is free
to use; its source code is not public.

Linguistic Field(s): Phonology
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng, stan1293)
                     French (fra, stan1290)
                     Italian (ita, ital1282)
                     Portuguese (por, port1283)
                     Spanish (spa, stan1288)


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