NATO phonetic alphabet by those who exchange voice messages by radio or telephone, regardless of language differences or the quality of the communication channel. The 26 code words in the NATO phonetic alphabet are assigned to the 26 letters of the English alphabet in alphabetical order as follows: , Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, , Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. Strict adherence to the prescribed spelling words is required in order to avoid the problems of confusion that the spelling alphabet is designed to overcome. As noted in a
Phonetic environment Phonetic environment In phonetics and linguistics the phonetic environment refers to the surrounding sounds of a target speech sound, or target phone, in a word. The phonetic environment of a phone can sometimes determine the allophonic or phonemic qualities of a sound in a given language. For example, the English vowel [a] in the word 'mat' [mat] has the consonants [m] preceding it and [t] following it. In linguistic notation it is written as /m__t, where the slash can be read as "in the environment", and the underscore represents the target phone's position relative to its neighbours. The expression therefore