Uralic Phonetic Alphabet

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The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) or Finno-Ugric transcription system is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription of Finno-Ugric languages. It was first published in 1901 by Emil Nestor Setälä, a Finnish linguist.

This page contains rare Unicode characters. You may need to install Code2000 to view some characters.

Unlike the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notational standard which concentrates on accurately and uniquely transcribing the phonemes of a language, the UPA is also used to denote the functional categories of a language, as well as their phonetic quality. For this reason, it is not possible to automatically convert a UPA transcription into an IPA one.

The basic UPA characters are based on the Finnish alphabet where possible, with extensions taken from Cyrillic and Greek orthographies. Small-capital letters and some novel diacritics are also used.

1 General
2 Vowels
3 Consonants
4 Modifiers
5 Sample use of UPA
6 External links

[edit] General

Unlike the IPA, which is usually transcribed with upright characters, the UPA is usually transcribed with italic characters. Although many of its characters are also used in standard Latin, Greek, Cyrillic orthographies or the IPA, and are found in the corresponding Unicode blocks, many are not. These have been encoded in the Phonetic Extensions and Phonetic Extensions Supplement blocks. Font support for these extended characters is very rare; Code2000 is one font which does support them.

[edit] Vowels

A vowel to the left of a dot is illabial (unrounded); to the right is labial (rounded).

Palatal

Central

Velar

Close

i • ü

• u

e • ö

• o

ä •

a • å

Near-close

Close-mid

Mid

Open-mid

Near-open

Open

Other vowels are denoted using diacritics; see the section below.

The UPA also uses three characters to denote a vowel of uncertain quality:

ɜ denotes a vowel of uncertain quality;
ᴕ denotes a back vowel of uncertain quality;
ᴕ́̈ denotes a front vowel of uncertain quality

[edit] Consonants

The following table describes the consonants of the UPA. Note that the UPA does not distinguish voiced fricatives from approximates, and does not contain many characters of the IPA such as [ɹ].

UPA consonants
	Stop			Fricative							Lateral		Trill		Nasal		Click
Bilabial	p	ʙ	b			φ		β					ᴪ	ψ	ᴍ	m	p˿	b˿
Labiodental	p͔	ʙ͔	b͔			f		v							ᴍ͔	m͔
Dental				θ	δ
Alveolar	t	ᴅ	d		ᴙ	s	ᴢ	z	š	ž	ʟ	l	ʀ	r	ɴ	n	t˿	d˿
Dentipalatal (palatalised)	ť	ᴅ́	ď			ś	ᴢ́	ź	š́	ž́	ʟ́	ĺ	ʀ́	ŕ	ɴ́	ń
Prepalatal (palatalised and/or anterior)	ḱ	ɢ́	ǵ			χ́		j							ᴎ́	ŋ́
Velar	k	ɢ	g			χ		γ							ᴎ	ŋ	k˿	g˿
Postvelar	k͔	ɢ͔	g͔			χ͔		γ͔				ᴫ			ᴎ͔	ŋ͔
Uvular													ᴩ	ρ

When there are two or more consonants in a column, the rightmost one is voiced; when there are three, the centre one is partially devoiced.

[edit] Modifiers

UPA modifier characters
Character	Unicode	Description	Use
ạ	U+0323	dot below	Palatal variant of vowel
a̮	U+032F	breve below	Velar variant of a vowel
ā	U+0304	macron	Long form of a vowel; also by duplication
a͔	U+0354	left arrowhead below	Advanced form of a vowel or consonant
a͕	U+0355	right arrowhead below	Retracted form of a vowel or consonant
a̭	U+032D	circumflex below	Raised variant of a vowel
a̬	U+032C	caron below	Lowered variant of a vowel
ă	U+0306	breve	Shorter or reduced vowel
a̯	U+032F	inverted breve below	Non-syllabic, glide or semi-vowel
ʀ	—	small capital	Unvoiced or partially voiced version of voiced sound
ⁱ	—	superscripted character	Very short sound
_ə	—	subscripted character	Coarticulation due to surrounding sounds
ᴞ	—	Rotated (180°) or sideways (−90°)	Reduced form of sound

[edit] Sample use of UPA

This section contains some sample words from both Finno-Ugric languages and English (using Australian English) along with comparisons to the IPA transcription.