Speaking of Standards

On Tuesday W3C released the Recommendation for the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS). “Recommendation” is the final step in the W3C standards process.

This specification defines a new markup language that is used to represent pronunciation dictionaries.
In it, written words would have one or more pronunciations defined for them. An SSML document could reference a PLS document to indicate how certain words should be pronounced.
An SRGS (W3C grammar format) document could reference a PLS document to indicate what pronunciations to listen for to match certain words.

Here is an example:

<lexicon version="1.0"  alphabet="ipa" xml:lang="en-US">
  <lexeme>
    <grapheme>judgment</grapheme>
    <grapheme>judgement</grapheme>
    <phoneme>ˈdʒʌdʒ.mənt</phoneme>
  </lexeme>
  <lexeme>
    <grapheme>fiancé</grapheme>
    <grapheme>fiance</grapheme>
    <phoneme>fiˈɒns.eɪ</phoneme>
    <phoneme>ˌfiː.ɑːnˈseɪ</phoneme>
  </lexeme>
</lexicon>

In this example there are two spellings for judgement and two for fiance. For each word there is a pronunciation (in <phoneme>) written in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

For more info on the specification, see the press release.