Sometimes linguists transcribing particular languages have developed conventions so they don't have to hunt around in the special characters. For example the En

Sometimes linguists transcribing particular languages have developed conventions so they don't have to hunt around in the special characters. For example the English r sound is really ɹ but people writing about English might write it as r. But in standard IPA, rolled r is the symbol r and nothing else. Some of the other things that look like nonstandard IPA are actually Americanist notation, which a lot of older linguists were trained in rather than IPA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation Still it's a lot less ambiguous than "sounds like 'ah'" which could be just about anything.