ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Case variants of IPA letters

Okay kiddo, do you know what the IPA is? It's like a special alphabet that helps people from all over the world understand how to say different sounds in different languages.

Now, within the IPA, there are different letters that represent different sounds. For example, the letter "A" makes the "ahh" sound in words like "cat" or "hat". But sometimes, we need different versions of these letters to represent slightly different sounds.

That's where case variants come in! Just like we have upper and lowercase letters in the regular alphabet, we also have uppercase and lowercase versions of some IPA letters.

For example, there's the letter "P", which makes the "puh" sound in words like "pot" or "pan". But there's also a lowercase version of this letter, "p", which represents a slightly different sound. This lowercase "p" makes a puff of air sound when spoken which is used in some languages.

So basically, the case variants of IPA letters help us to accurately represent different sounds that might not have just one simple letter to represent them.