Writing English phonetic symbols when using a different language package

Question

I'm writing a document in Spanish language, and I'd like to introduce English phonetics for some words. Is it possible to do so?

I've tried this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{tipa}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\begin{document}
    /fəˈnɛtɪk/
\end{document}

but it doesn't work.

---

I've retaken this to make some tests but it's not working for me.
I'm using the preamble provided by egreg's answer but I'm having the error \select@language{spanish}
How can I fix this?

Answer 1

If you want to use UTF-8 characters for the phonetic symbols, you have to teach them to LaTeX, because the tipa package doesn't provide support for this. Alternatively, you can input them with the shorthands provided by the package.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{tipa}
\usepackage{newunicodechar}
\newunicodechar{ˈ}{"}
\newunicodechar{ə}{@}
\newunicodechar{ɛ}{E}
\newunicodechar{ɪ}{I}

\begin{document}

\textipa{/fəˈnɛtɪk/}

\textipa{/f@"nEtIk/}

\end{document}

How to extend the set of supported characters? Let's see, for instance,

ˌjuːnɪˈvɜːsɪtɪ

I added \textipa{/ˌjuːnɪˈvɜːsɪtɪ/} to the example above and, upon running pdflatex, I saw the errors

Unicode char ˌ (U+2CC) not set up for use with LaTeX

Unicode char ː (U+2D0) not set up for use with LaTeX

Unicode char ɜ (U+25C) not set up for use with LaTeX

Then I went to the manual of tipa, Appendix A Annotated List of TIPA Symbols and looked for the characters, just like I did for the previous ones. The last one appears like in the image below

so I know what shorthand to put in the second argument to \newunicodechar.

Here is the full example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{tipa}

\usepackage{newunicodechar}
\newunicodechar{ˈ}{"}
\newunicodechar{ə}{@}
\newunicodechar{ɛ}{E}
\newunicodechar{ɪ}{I}
\newunicodechar{ˌ}{""}
\newunicodechar{ː}{:}
\newunicodechar{ɜ}{3}

\begin{document}

\textipa{/ˌjuːnɪˈvɜːsɪtɪ/}

\textipa{/fəˈnɛtɪk/}

\textipa{/f@"nEtIk/}

\end{document}

Instead of \newunicodechar you could use

\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{025C}{3}

instead of \newunicodechar{ɜ}{3}, but I find it more convenient to have the “real” character instead of its code point.

Answer 2

If you compile with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX instead of pdfLaTeX, you shouldn't have any trouble using the Unicode symbols directly in your .tex file. See Typesetting phonetic symbols: Unicode or tipa? for a list of reasons to do this instead of using tipa.

This MWE will work fine if you don't load polyglossia and set the default language to Spanish, but doing so will load language-specific hyphenation, punctuation, and spacing patterns (polyglossia is the XeLaTeX counterpart of babel).

With fontspec, you can load any system font that has the symbols you need, so feel free to replace Charis SIL with one you have on your system.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage{spanish}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Charis SIL}

\begin{document}
\noindent Puedo escribir en español.\\
\noindent [ˈpweðo eskɾiˈβiɾ en espaˈɲol]
\end{document}