Key:name:pronunciation

This tag contains a phonetic guide to pronouncing the name contained in name=*. The name is transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), either using a broad transcription or a narrow transcription.

Rationale

This tag can be useful for clarifying an idiosyncratic pronunciation. For example:

• Most places named Reading are pronounced like "redding" in English, not like "reeding". This pronunciation extends beyond places to the roads and points of interest named after them.
• Houston Street in New York City is pronounced very differently than the city of Houston, Texas, or the Scottish village of Houston, Renfrewshire.
• The Vietnamese given names Dũng and Loan have very different pronunciations than the English words "dung" and "loan" but often appear in English-language street and POI names in some parts of the United States. 500813798 500813798 7164922833 7164922833
• Some business names contain unit symbols that look similar to words. (In general, name=* expands abbreviations, but nevertheless abbreviations in business names and other trademarks are commonly left alone.) 7979223615 7979223615

End users may benefit from seeing a pronunciation hint below a place’s label on a map, or from hearing the place name correctly read aloud while navigating with a routing application. Blind users also rely on software to read map features aloud. A renderer or geocoder can use an unambiguous phonetic transcription to automatically transliterate from an irregular orthography like English to another orthography. A geocoder can also use the phonetic transcription to generate "did you mean" results according to a phonetic algorithm.

This tag was first used in 2008 on various English place POIs.

Variations

As with name=*, an ISO 639 language code can be included in the key to specify the pronunciation in a particular language. For example, if a feature is tagged with name:en=* and name:fr=*, name:en:pronunciation=* and name:fr:pronunciation=* can indicate the pronunciation in English and French, respectively. The :pronunciation suffix is also used on a several other name-related keys, such as official_name:pronunciation=* and destination:pronunciation=*.

As an alternative to tagging a feature with a name:pronunciation=* tag, the wikidata=* tag allows you to associate a feature with the Wikidata item describing the same feature. That item can be tagged with an IPA transcription statement. However, note that Wikidata items are subject to different inclusion criteria than OpenStreetMap features.

Examples

• 
  name=Bourg-en-Bresse
name:pronunciation=buʁk ã bʁɛs
• name=Houston Street Station name:pronunciation=ˈhaʊstən stɹiːt ˈsteɪʃən
  name=Houston Street Station
name:pronunciation=ˈhaʊstən stɹiːt ˈsteɪʃən
• 
  name=Houston Chronicle
name:pronunciation=ˈhjuːstɨn ˈkɹɒnɪkəl
• 
  name=Reading
name:pronunciation=ˈɹɛdɪŋ

Software support

OSRM v5.2 and above includes the value of this tag in the RouteStep object. Mapbox Directions for Swift exposes this value as RouteStep.phoneticNames when connecting to an OSRM-powered server.

Clients of these libraries can pass the transcription into any text-to-speech engine that supports IPA, which is the default phonetic alphabet of the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML). [1] A number of text-to-speech engines support IPA transcriptions, including:

• Amazon Polly (supported IPA characters, contains some typos)
• AVFoundation (IPA support built into iOS 10 and above)
• IBM Text to Speech
• Nuance SpeechKit

The open source eSpeak and MaryTTS projects both support Kirshenbaum, an ASCII representation of IPA.

The Mapbox Navigation SDK for Android and iOS applies IPA transcriptions from name:pronunciation=* when announcing turn instructions using Amazon Polly. The iOS version also applies IPA transcriptions when falling back to AVFoundation when Polly is unavailable. [2]

This GitHub issue tracks implementing name:pronunciation=* support in Valhalla.

Possible synonyms

As recorded in the IANA Language Subtag Registry, the IETF BCP 47 equivalent is *:*-Latn-fonipa=*. It's not used yet as of 2021-03.

See also

• Proposed features/Phonetics
• OSM for the blind
• Relevant Sophox queries:
  • Homographs
  • Invalid pronunciations

External links

• w:Help:IPA/Introduction – an introduction to IPA for English speakers
• w:Help:IPA/English – an IPA pronunciation key for English
• IPA character picker
• IPA Chart Unicode Keyboard
• IPA Palette installable keyboard layout for macOS