Interestingly enough, the IPA is in fact not the only phonetic transcription system. The most famous alternative is Americanist notation [0], but there’s also the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet [1] and probably others as well which I’ve forgotten.<p>However, the IPA has one distinguishing feature: it’s <i>standardised</i>, by the International Phonetic Association. By contrast, Americanist notation (the main competitor) is mostly unstandardised; for the most part, it’s not so much a ‘phonetic alphabet’ as much as a set of conventions people follow. And this doesn’t matter if the author has been careful to define their terms correctly, but it can be a real pain if they’ve forgotten. (e.g. for a while, I believed that Kalam had [r] as an allophone of [d], until I realised that the author had used ⟨ř⟩ to mean [ɾ], not [r]…) Thus, the linguistics community has mostly standardised on IPA, with the exception of some subfields which still use Americanist notation.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet</a>