The entire IPA is available in unicode. You could treat those as ligatures with a special combinator character, which would work a lot like flags, skintones etc

The entire IPA is available in unicode. You could treat those as ligatures with a special combinator character, which would work a lot like flags, skintones etc work. eg: [special begin character] + NEUTRAL FACE (U+1F610) + [IPA characters] + (special end character) = talking face! hurray! "text engine developers hate him"