Which Vietnamese dialect is transcribed?

The tool uses the Northern (Hanoi) standard, where six tones are fully distinguished. Southern Vietnamese merges hỏi and ngã, so the six-way contrast here reflects Northern speech.

How are the six tones marked in IPA?

Ngang is level ˧, huyền is low-falling ˨˩, sắc is high-rising ˧˥, hỏi is dipping ˧˩˧, ngã is creaky rising ˧ˀ˥, and nặng is low-glottalised ˨˩ˀ. The tool prints each as IPA tone letters.

Why does d become /z/?

In Northern Vietnamese, the letters d and gi both surface as /z/, while đ is the implosive /ɗ/. The tool applies the Hanoi consonant values, so these spellings map to their spoken sounds rather than their letter names.

Does it handle the ng and nh codas?

Yes. Final ng is /ŋ/ and nh is /ɲ/, and after the back rounded vowels they trigger the labial-velar offglide. The tool maps the orthographic finals to their correct nasal and stop IPA codas.

Vietnamese IPA Transcription Tool

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Vietnamese IPA transcription maps chữ Quốc ngữ (the Latin orthography) to International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, including all six Northern tones. Each Vietnamese syllable has a strict onset–glide–nucleus–coda structure, and the tone is carried by a diacritic over the nucleus.

How it works

The transcriber strips the tone diacritic from the nucleus to identify the tone, then maps the syllable parts to Hanoi phonemic values:

onsets:  d, gi → /z/   đ → /ɗ/   ph → /f/   x → /s/   kh → /x/   r → /z/
nuclei:  a → /a/   ơ → /əː/   ư → /ɯ/   ô → /o/   ê → /e/
codas:   ng → /ŋ/   nh → /ɲ/   ch → /k/   c → /k/   t → /t/
tones:   ngang ˧   huyền ˨˩   sắc ˧˥   hỏi ˧˩˧   ngã ˧ˀ˥   nặng ˨˩ˀ

Tone marks are detected by decomposing each vowel to NFD and reading the combining accent, after which the base letter feeds the nucleus lookup.

Example and notes

má (mother/cheek) is onset /m/, nucleus /a/, sắc tone, giving [ma˧˥]. nghiêng (to lean) uses the trigraph onset ngh /ŋ/, the diphthong iê /iə/, and the velar coda ng /ŋ/, with ngang tone: [ŋiəŋ˧]. The transcription targets the Northern standard, so hỏi and ngã stay distinct and d/gi/r all collapse to /z/.