LYCOS RETRIEVER 
International Phonetic Alphabet: British English
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SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet) is a machine-readable phonetic alphabet. It was originally developed under the ESPRIT project 1541, SAM (Speech Assessment Methods) in 1987-89 by an international group of phoneticians, and was applied in the first instance to the European Communities languages Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, and Italian (by 1989); later to Norwegian and Swedish (by 1992); and subsequently to Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish (1993). Under the BABEL project, it has now been extended to Bulgarian, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian (1996). Under the aegis of COCOSDA it is hoped to extend it to cover many other languages (and in principle all languages). On the initiative of the OrienTel project, Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish have been added. Other recent additions: Cantonese, Croatian, Czech, Russian, Slovenian, Thai.
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Mention the phonetic alphabet to a native-English speaker, and the first phrase that comes to mind is: "Alpha Bravo Charlie." It stands for ABC, and is used in the military to avoid miscommunication. It's ... frequently used by anyone speaking on the phone (to a customer service represenative, for instance) to spell out words (or portions of those words) to confirm the correct spelling.
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In military use British and American armed forces each developed their phonetic alphabets prior to both forces adopting the NATO alphabet in 1956. British forces adopted the RAF phonetic alphabet which is similar to the phonetic alphabet used by the Royal Navy in World War I. The U.S. adopted the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet from 1941 to standardize systems amongst all branches of their armed forces. The U.S. alphabet became known as Able Baker after the words for A and B. The British adapted their RAF alphabet in 1943 to be almost identical to the U.S. one.
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