You have used IPA to document your language’s words and their features, but this chapter introduces other options for writing your conlang, beginning with a brief overview of different types of writing systems. The second section introduces romanization strategies, which utilize standard keyboard characters to represent sounds in a language. The third section discusses how you can adapt an existing orthography to your conlang, provided it makes sense for your speakers to have access to that existing orthography. Finally, the fourth section discusses the process of creating a unique orthography if that is the direction you want to take for your language. By the end of this chapter, you will decide how you might romanize your language and whether you will use an orthography to represent the written form of your language.

A key aspect of academic phonetics is transcription. Transcription involves writing speech in a special alphabet called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that permits writing the sounds of speech with great precision. The modern IPA is the result of historical development, and it incorporates a number of principles that contribute to ease of use: based on the latin (roman) alphabet; extending letters by modification of latin letters; use of other known letters; use of diacritics (accents); and others. Transcription may lean toward being broad or phonological, ortoward being narrow or strictly phonetic. The IPA makes typographic distinctions that we do not make in nonphonetic writing. Glyphs are specific letter shapes, and the IPA may distinguish glyphs that are not distinguished in ordinary writing.