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0:00
This is the NATO phonetic alphabet. You’ve heard pilots, soldiers and police officers use it and it is so much cleverer than you think. These 26 words were meticulously chosen as part of a secretive process in the wake of the second word war. A process that you’ll struggle to find information about. However, I’ve dug deep into the archives of NATO and beyond to get you the full story and it is fascinating. So let’s talk about it in another RobWords.
0:33
I'm in an aircraft hangar in the middle of a storm. You can perhaps hear the wind rattling the doors here. The relevance of the planes around me will become clear. But first up, a note about the name: the NATO Phonetic Alphabet. Two points here: one, it is not a phonetic alphabet. This is a phonetic alphabet. What we actually have here is a “spelling alphabet”. It helps you spell things out clearly, even over a dodgy phone line or a noisy radio connection.
1:05
And two: it was not invented by NATO. I’ll get into all of that, but a lot of people call it the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, so let’s stick with that name for now. Now, allow me to introduce you briefly to its 26 members, starting with: ALFA - the first letter of the Greek alphabet, but that's not normally how you spell it, is it? I'll explain why. BRAVO - an Italian word, used in lots of other languages. CHARLIE - starts with a CH to help avoid confusion with K or even Q.
1:36
DELTA - another Greek character. River deltas are actually so called because the Nile delta looked like the Greek letter. ECHO - another Greek character. A literal one from the myth of Echo and Narcissus. FOXTROT - chosen above FOX because it’s the same in many languages, whereas FOX isn’t. GOLF - the sport is generally known as “golf” everywhere. HOTEL - a French word recognised in lots of languages, including English.
2:04
INDIA - placenames are good for these alphabets because they don’t change much between languages, although they can become awkward if, say, you work for an airline in India. JULIETT - another one spelt weirdly, for reasons I'll explain. KILO - good K words are surprisingly hard to find. LIMA - another placename. MIKE - people’s names often appear, for reasons that I will get into. NOVEMBER - now, a lot of work went into choosing this one as you will see.
2:33
OSCAR - another person’s name common in lots of European languages. PAPA - a surprisingly universal word for dad or Pope. QUEBEC - guess where the organisation that actually invented this alphabet was based. ROMEO - because you can’t have Juliet without her Romeo. There’s actually more to it than that. SIERRA - initially an unpopular choice. See if you can guess why? TANGO - another dance with a universal name. UNIFORM - replaced UNION at the last minute, donchya know.
3:04
VICTOR - a person’s name, but also a confident word for the battlefield. WHISKEY - the drink’s known as whiskey all over the world, even if the spelling varies. X-RAY - try thinking of another word that begins with an X and doesn’t make a Z sound. YANKEE - replaced YORK used by the Brits and YOKE used by the Americans. And ZULU - which was so very nearly ZEBRA. So those are the words and they’ve gone unchanged for seven decades. They were fixed in 1956.
3:34
But the story of the alphabet goes back much further. It starts with the invention of the telephone in the 1870s, [voice on phone] "Loser!" because with telephone calls comes a problem that needs solving. Early phone lines were far from crystal clear. They’re still not, are they? But they were even worse back then. And this led to miscommunications. Early telephonists found that if ever they needed to spell something out, like someone’s name, one letter would get misheard as another.
4:04
“It’s Jacobs. J A C O B S.” For example, D and T are hard to tell apart at the best of times. But on a really bad line, C, D, E, G, P, V, and Z - if you're an American - can sound similar too. Ditto F, S, and X. I and Y. Q and U. L, M and N sound alike, and A, H, J and K can be easily confused. In 1904 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company - or AT&T to you and me, ALPHA TANGO and TANGO – sent this advice to its employees, pointing out that
4:44
“The letters B, C, D, F, H, M, N, P ,S, T, V, X, Y and Z are the ones which are most likely to be misunderstood.” So how to avoid any potential mix-ups? Well this is what the company told its staff to do about it. For each of these tricky letters, they should read out the preceding two letters of the alphabet as well. You can see it here. In 1910, Western Union Telegraph Company - or Western Union to you and me - made the same suggestion to its telephonists, with an example.
5:18
“The name ‘Z. Flood” should be spelled
5:22
Z, X-Y-Z, F, D-E-F, L-double O-D”. Now is it just me or is that D-E-Fing confusing? Not to worry though. Western Union had another suggestion for its staff. It said misunderstandings could also be mitigated “by following the name of a letter with some frequently used proper name beginning with the letter in question.” As an example it says “The word ‘Drown’...” Weird example. “...should be spelled D for Dora, R-O-W-N.” Now that technique is a bit more familiar, isn’t it?
5:58
But it’s not perfect, right? Some names sound very similar to one another, and what might be a common name to one person might not be to someone else. There had to be a better way. And within two years, they had one. A clever employee, who had also worked for AT&T, looked at the words telephonists were typically using and compiled a standardised list for everyone to use. And here it is. You can see a lot of the Western Union employees had taken to using placenames
6:28
as well as people’s names: BOSTON, CHICAGO and DENVER. And then you’ve got some wildcards like QUEEN, X-RAY and ZERO. But there it is. One of the very first spelling alphabets. I say “one of”, because away from the telecoms industry, another sector had been developing its own spelling alphabets. Namely, the military. I’ll get into that in a second, but first I want to see how many phonetic letters I can squeeze into this next bit. Because I’ve just got back from a holiday to the states.
7:01
In fact I genuinely did fly DELTA. I really did. But while I was there I could surf the HOTEL wifi like I was back home thanks to this video’s sponsor NordVPN. NordVPN allows you to change your online location, meaning if you’re in, say, INDIA, you can browse like you’re in LIMA or QUEBEC and therefore access streaming content that might be blocked where you are. But not only that – using a VPN on unsecured public wifi hides your IP YANKEEps you safe from online snoopers too.
7:35
NordVPN also provides a complete web protection package, ensuring that when up against cyber criminals, you’re always the VICTOR. Its Threat Protection Pro feature will scan any files you download for malware, direct you away from websites known for scamming people, and block irritating or harmful pop-ups. BRAVO NordVPN. MIKE drop? I have NordVPN switched on all the time and because I can have it on up to 10 devices, my whole family can stay protected. Even PAPA.
8:04
To get all of these advantages too, be smarTANGO to nordvpn.com/robwordsvpn that’s nordvpn.com/robwordsvpn. Is there an ECHO? Or use the link in the description of this video to get an exclusive deal with an extra four months on top. NOVEMBER is a month. There’s a 30-day money back guarantee, so there’s not a KILO of risk. Give it a go.....lf. GO-. GOLF. Where were we? So the civil telecoms industry is experimenting with spelling alphabets. But in the meantime - never to be out-manoeuvred -
8:42
armed forces either side of the Atlantic have also been creating them. The US navy had one for identifying flag signals. And by the onset of the First World War in 1914, the Brits had theirs too. The British Army was communicating using this, sort of adorable, alphabet featuring cute couplets like MONKEY and NUTS, and ORANGE and PIP. But also nice Britishisms like YORKER, which is a term from cricket.
9:10
By the end of the war, the newly minted US Air Service had developed yet another alphabet, separate from the US Navy. Here it is in a circular from 1920. The ABLE BOY alphabet. A few things to point out about this one. First: I love that they’ve used the British word for Z as their word for Z, ZED. Second: QUACK is an excellent choice for Q. And third: Don’t these ones look familiar? Not a coincidence. During the 20s and 30s, things frankly got a bit ridiculous.
9:41
By the time the Second Word War rolled around, every armed service in Britain and the U.S. had developed its own individual spelling alphabet. The pilots were using one, the sailors another and the soldiers yet another. With the onset of war, something had to change. So in 1942, the US Army Air Forces commissioned Harvard’s Psycho-Acoustic laboratory to come up with a single definitive list to be used, not just by the American services, but by the Brits too.
10:11
It was to be carefully crafted using the best words from the dozen-or-so alphabets already in military and civilian use, along with other words they thought suitable. They considered 2,400 words all in all. It was a lot. Perhaps too many. War was raging and the need was urgent. What’s more, squabbling between the Americans and the Brits was getting in the way of finalising the new alphabet. A report for the US Air Force later described how they therefore had to rush through a compromise.
10:42
“The Generals and the Admirals went down the list taking first a U.S. and then a UK preference to complete the list and get on with the war.” The alphabet that resulted from the compromise was this one: The Combined Services alphabet, also known as the ABLE BAKER alphabet. We’re still quite a long way from ALFA, BRAVO, CHARLIE, but we’re on our way there, aren’t we? CHARLIE is already in place. And so are MIKE, VICTOR and X-RAY. And so far as the English-speaking world was concerned,
11:14
this was the best spelling alphabet available, combining tried and tested terms with words chosen by linguists for their clarity and distinctiveness. And they won the war with it. So, you know, there you go. It is actually worth mentioning the approach the Germans took during the war, because it was the source of a very recent controversy. For many decades, the Germans had been using a spelling alphabet devised for the Berlin Telephone Directory,
11:40
made up entirely of men’s and women's first names. ANTON, BERTHA etc. However, with the rise of the Nazis came calls to change it. Specifically these four names here. Why? Well, because they were considered too Jewish. And those calls were heeded in Berlin. In 1934 DAVID was replaced with DORA, NATHAN became NORDPOL – that’s "North Pole", the birthplace of the Aryans according to Nazi pseudoscience. SAMUEL became SIEGFRIED, and ZACHARIAS became ZEPELLIN.
12:20
These changes stuck, and they remained in place for almost 90 years until as recently as 2022, when finally, after years of pressure from antisemitism campaigners, das Deutsche Institut für Normung, the German Institute for Standardisation published a completely new official spelling alphabet. It uses German placenames instead of people’s names, with the D.I.N. saying “city names are very catchy and, unlike first names, are not subject to fashion.” All very true.
12:51
However, it also specifically cited the Nazi-era purge of Jewish names as the main driver for coming up with a new one. Anyway, back to the Allies, And towards the end of World War II, governments realised they'd got something else to contend with: An imminent boom in, not military aviation, but civil aviation. Flights aren’t just for fights. In 1944, in Chicago, 52 nations signed a convention that would establish an international body to oversee the skies in peacetime:
13:28
the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, which still exists today. And it’s this organisation, headquartered in QUEBEC, that is the actual founder of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet. Indeed, it’s sometimes called the ICAO Phonetic Alphabet. But we’re still not there yet. The first official ICAO alphabet was this one: ABLE BAKER. They just pinched it from the armed forces. And why not? It had been proven to work.
14:00
Except, there was a key difference between the needs of the British and American militaries, and the burgeoning global aviation industry. Many members of ICAO didn’t speak English. Now, while in principle that didn’t necessarily matter – you don’t have to know what BAKER or YOKE mean to use them – it did create problems. At one point, ICAO commissioned tests to see how foreign language speakers handled ABLE BAKER.
14:26
The researchers asked people who had never spoken a single word of English in their lives to spell out words using this Anglo-American alphabet. And then they noted down what that sounded like. In one test, a Spanish participant was asked to spell out the letters J H G using the phonetic alphabet. And when they did so, researchers wrote down what they heard: “HEEG OH HAY-OR-HAY”. “HEEG OH HOY-OR-HAY”. This was the Spanish participant’s attempt at pronouncing JIG HOW GEORGE. Not ideal.
15:02
ICAO knew that an international organisation was going to need a more international spelling alphabet. And it also knew that to create one, it was going to need help. Enter Professor Jean-Paul Vinay, a respected linguist at the University of Montreal, who was given the task of developing a completely new spelling alphabet. And Professor Vinay was told that, to be considered, any word had to meet five criteria: 1, “it had to be a live word in each of the three working languages” of ICAO.
15:35
So English, Spanish and French. It had to be easily pronounced and recognized by airmen of all languages. “It must have good radio transmission and readability characteristics.” Whatever the heck that means. “Have a similar spelling in at least English, French and Spanish, and the initial letter must be the letter the word identifies.” That seems like two points to me, but whatever. And 5: It must be free from any association with objectionable meanings. So basically, no naughty words.
16:07
Or words that sounded naughty in other languages. It was a heck of a task, but Professor Vinay did it and this is what he came up with. Look how familiar it is. Already we have ALFA and JULIETT with their unusual spellings. Vinay was worried non-English or non-Ancient Greek speakers would mispronounce the PH, not as "fun" but as "puh". And that without the added T, the French would say JOO-LEE-AY instead of Juliet. A lot of ancient Greek words in there, actually,
16:39
playing on Europe’s shared history. The placenames were chosen because they are common to many languages and don't change over time. And we have three dances there: FOXTROT, POLKA and TANGO, which also have universal names. I don’t know if the weird spelling of YANKEE is intentional or just a typo in the document I sourced it from. But either way, this alphabet is impressive, because it really does work in English, French and Spanish. Well done JP.
17:10
But before putting it to use, the ICAO member states requested a few changes. For whatever reasons, POLKA became PAPA and ZEBRA became ZULU. And in 1952 this is the alphabet that was put into effect. And guess what… Everybody hated it. Especially the English-speakers did. Those that were used to ABLE BAKER were naturally a bit disgruntled about having to learn a new alphabet. But they also had complaints like the ICAO alphabet having too many syllables, for example.
17:41
Which is not an absurd thing to point out. This new alphabet had longer words. Only one of them, GOLF, was a single syllable, whereas in ABLE BAKER you had DOG, FOX, HOW, JIG, KING etc. But proponents of the ICAO alphabet pointed out that this was by design. It made it less likely that an entire word could be obscured by a moment of static. You could lose FOX in a brief crackle but with FOXTROT.. Well, you’d only lose half of it, wouldn't you?
18:11
But anyway, there was enough objection in the US and UK to make ICAO think again. Especially as the new North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, had shown an interest in using the international civil aviation alphabet as well. So they ran some tests to see if the new alphabet really was better than the ABLE BAKER combined forces alphabet. Because if not, what was the point of getting everyone to learn a new one? So ICAO asked Ohio State university to compare the two alphabets
18:42
and to cut a long story short, this is what they found: “Both foreign and American listeners showed significantly better results in receiving the ICAO alphabet under reception conditions ranging from fair to very bad.” Basically, ALFA BRAVO COCA dramatically outperformed ABLE BAKER CHARLIE. Professor Vinay has been vinadicated. Vinay-dicated. However, the research had turned up some room for improvement in his alphabet. So ICAO commissioned yet more research.
19:14
They wanted to test two things this time. First: how generally intelligible each word was. How easy it was to make it out. And second: how often one of the words got confused with one of the others. So, they tried the words out on foreign and US air personnel and the intriguing results are in this absolute mess of a table. On the far right you have an articulation score, which tells you what percentage of the time a word was correctly identified.
19:41
The higher percentage, the more intelligible it was. Then the circled numbers flag up where a word was frequently confused with another. So take the word for M, METRO. It was often confused with three others: ECHO, NECTAR and EXTRA. And you can see how that could happen, right? Under bad conditions. METRO ECHO NECTAR EXTRA. So something had to change. And given its extremely low articulation rating, just 52.9%, ICAO decided that METRO had to go. The study actually resulted in three changes.
20:17
COCA was also ditched, which was good because some people thought having a brand name – it was a reference to Coca Cola – was bad for some reason. PEPSI, ESSO, KODAK and JELLO were all also considered and discarded at one point or another. And EXTRA was removed, which had the bonus impact of getting rid of the only word that didn’t start with the letter that it represented. In come the CHARLIE, MIKE and X-RAY that we know and love.
20:42
Further testing also resulted in FOXTROT, UNION and ZULU being ditched in favour of FOOTBALL, UNIFORM and ZEBRA. But yet more tests found that FOOTBALL and ZEBRA were actually worse than the words they replaced. So back came FOXTROT and ZULU. Et voilà. Here it is. The finalised ICAO, and therefore NATO, phonetic alphabet. Except... hold on. Something still isn’t right, is it? What’s going on here? Shouldn’t that be NOVEMBER? Well, having apparently finished its work,
21:16
ICAO was made aware by a British research group, that the word NECTAR was thought to be too similar to the word for V, VICTOR – which it kind of was – and the Brits wanted it changed. So they ran some more tests, which resulted in a shortlist of two. NOVEMBER and… NUGGET. We nearly had nugget. But NOVEMBER was chosen and, finally, here we really are. Here’s a NATO communication confirming those last changes and confirming that as soon as ICAO approved it,
21:47
NATO too would be adopting this new spelling alphabet. ALFA BRAVO CHARLIE DELTA ECHO FOXTROT GOLF HOTEL INDIA JULIETT KILO LIMA MIKE NOVEMBER OSCAR PAPA QUEBEC - which was the recommended pronunciation, by the way, not KWEBEK - ROMEO SIERRA TANGO UNIFORM VICTOR WHISKY X-RAY YANKEE ZULU. 26 words carefully chosen to be as comprehensible as possible, as difficult to mix up as possible, and as international as possible. And almost 70 years later, we’re still using them.
22:22
Are they perfect? I mean, I think they’re pretty close. There was a last minute request to change SIERRA because it sounded too much like ZERO, but here’s a NATO letter telling whoever requested it to pipe down, because changing one word would probably mean having to change a load of others too. The word WHISKEY also proved controversial, particularly with some church groups, but it remains. The NATO Phonetic Alphabet was not invented by NATO and is not a Phonetic Alphabet.
22:50
But what it is, is an achievement. The product of years of linguistic experimentation and international cooperation and I think it's brilliant. Thanks for watching. And thanks also to the marvellous people of Derby Aero Club here at Derby Airfield for letting me have a poke around in their hangar. If you’ve enjoyed this, do let the YouTube bots know by hitting like and subscribe and I’ll see you in whatever you choose to watch next. Maybe this. This is ROMEO WHISKEY, over and out.
23:25
[bang as Rob hits floor]
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