---
id: phonemizer-fork
version: "3.3.2"
license: GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 29 June 2007 Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <http://fsf.org/> Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license… (full text in the JSON record)
license_treatment: copyleft
maintenance: active
---

# phonemizer-fork — Simple text to phones converter for multiple languages

License: copyleft · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 966.3K/mo

## What it is and what it does

Phonemizer-fork is a Python library that converts written text into phonetic transcriptions—sequences of individual speech sounds (phones)—in multiple languages. It wraps four different phonemization backends (espeak, espeak-mbrola, festival, and segments), each with different capabilities: espeak supports IPA output for many languages at fast speed, espeak-mbrola uses SAMPA for a smaller set of languages but slower, festival handles American English with syllable-level tokenization, and segments uses user-defined grapheme-to-phoneme mappings. The library provides both a command-line tool and a Python API for straightforward text-to-phone conversion.

You would use this package when you need to convert text into phonetic form for speech synthesis, linguistic analysis, or training speech-related machine learning models. The choice of backend depends on your language, required phonetic alphabet (IPA vs. SAMPA vs. custom), and whether you need syllable-level or word-level tokenization. It handles punctuation preservation and stressed phones where supported, and integrates with joblib for parallel processing.

Use it for:

- Prepare training data for speech systems by converting text to phonetic representations using espeak or festival
- Analyze pronunciation patterns across languages for linguistic research or language learning applications
- Build custom phonemization workflows for languages using the segments backend with user-provided mappings
- Extract syllable-level phonetic tokens for prosody analysis or rhythm-based speech processing in English
- Convert multilingual text to IPA for comparative phonetic studies

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Converts text to phonetic representations (phones) in multiple languages using pluggable backends like espeak, espeak-mbrola, festival, or segments.

Yes, if you need multilingual text-to-phoneme conversion. The package is actively maintained, has low install friction, and offers flexible backend selection for different use cases. The GPLv3+ license is a hard constraint only if you're building proprietary software; for research, open-source, or internal projects it poses no barrier. No known vulnerabilities.

## Install

pip install phonemizer-fork
uv add phonemizer-fork
poetry add phonemizer-fork

## Installing phonemizer-fork

Before you install: Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel and only 5 runtime dependencies. Repository is active with recent commits and 1567 stars.

License in practice: Licensed under GPLv3+, a copyleft license requiring that any derivative works or distributions remain under the same terms. Suitable for open-source projects but incompatible with proprietary software that cannot be released under GPL.

Quickstart:

pip install phonemizer-fork
from phonemizer.phonemize import phonemize
phones = phonemize('hello', language='en-us', backend='espeak')

Backend engines (espeak, festival, espeak-mbrola) may require separate system installation depending on which backend you select.

Verify before relying:

- Whether backend engines are bundled or must be installed separately on the system
- Whether this fork is actively maintained or has diverged from the original phonemizer package
- Exact language and feature support for each backend beyond the comparison table

## Package facts

- License: GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 29 June 2007 Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <http://fsf.org/> Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license… (full text in the JSON record) (copyleft)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 966.3K/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

text to phonemes converter, grapheme to phoneme g2p, multilingual phonemization, IPA phonetic transcription, speech synthesis phonemes, text to phones python, phoneme extraction tool, phonetics, nlp, speech-processing

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