International Phonetic Alphabet

universally accepted way of transliterating words

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, foreign language teachers, singers, actors, lexicographers, and translators.
See more at Wikipedia.org...

<text, human language> (IPA) A system of symbols for representing pronunciation. There is no commonly agreed way to represent IPA in ASCII characters though it can be represented in Unicode.
[Reference?]
(1998-12-30)