You also don’t need to install a separate program to clutter up your computer, just a few free fonts and a keyboard layout. The beauty of this method is that it uses software built into Mac OS X, and that you can use IPA fonts in any application that supports Unicode (translation: lots of them), not just specific programs. In this post, I’m going to explain, as simply as possible, how to go about finding the files and setting this up, all without paying a dime for specialty software. However, to get the more cool/obscure characters and diacritics, or to stack diacritics (placing, for instance, a tone marking above a nasal marking), you need special fonts, layouts and setup.

Some of the characters are easy enough to use without any special work (ŋ, ə), as most fonts already include them. See all postsĪs a linguist, you find yourself using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) incredibly frequently. At this point, it works for any version of MacOS including 11.1 ’Big Sur”.

This was originally posted on my blog, Notes from a Linguistic Mystic in 2007, but is kept updated here for the internet’s use.