Enjoying a leisurely walk along The Esplanade in Weymouth last month, I came across these pedalos with phonetic ‘names’. Naturally, being a translator, my first thought was, what are the French and German phonetic alphabets? And how useful would they have been on placement when I was trying to write down phone messages and names! Why weren’t we taught them??…so back in the office, I looked them up and thought I would share them here. Might frame them like my ALT codes for quick and easy access too.

Although called the ‘NATO phonetic alphabet’, it’s actually a ‘spelling’ alphabet and not the same as the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/). This spelling alphabet was introduced by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in the 1950s to aid communication by telephone or radio by assigning code words to letters that could be understood regardless of language barrier and possible transmission static.

Interesting fact: Alfa and Juliett are not spelled incorrectly, they are ‘non-English spellings’. As non-native speakers of English may not pronounce the ph of Alpha correctly, an f is used; likewise there is a second t on Juliett because French users may leave the single t silent.

Austria and Switzerland have a slightly different code to the Germany one. These can be found online for example at: http://german.about.com/library/blfunkabc.htm. France’s is also not standardised and the variations can be found at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:French_phonetic_alphabet.

by