Uralic Phonetic Alphabet

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

UPA differs from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation in several ways.

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.

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 and Fixedsys Excelsior are two fonts that do support them. A professional font containing them is Andron Mega; it supports UPA characters in Regular and Italics.

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

Other vowels are denoted using diacritics.

The UPA also uses three characters to denote a vowel of uncertain quality:
 *  denotes a vowel of uncertain quality;
 *  denotes a back vowel of uncertain quality;
 *  denotes a front vowel of uncertain quality

If a distinction between close-mid vowels and open-mid vowels is needed, the IPA symbols for the open-mid basic front unrounded and back rounded vowels, ⟨ɛ⟩ and ⟨ɔ⟩, can be used. However, in keeping with the principles of the UPA, the open-mid front rounded and back unrounded vowels are still transcribed with the addition of diacritics, as $⟨⟩$ and $⟨⟩$.

Consonants
The following table describes the consonants of the UPA. The UPA does not distinguish voiced fricatives from approximants, and does not contain many characters of the IPA such as, , or.

When there are two or more consonants in a column, the rightmost one is voiced; when there are three, the centre one is lenis or partially devoiced. Small-capital $⟨ᴫ⟩$ and lower-case $⟨л⟩$ are distinct in italic typeface, which is the norm for phonetic notation.

ʔ denotes a glottal stop.

ᴤ denotes a voiced laryngeal spirant.

Modifiers
For diphthongs, triphthongs and prosody, the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet uses several forms of the tie or double breve:
 * The triple inverted breve or triple breve below indicates a triphthong
 * The double inverted breve, also known as the ligature tie, marks a diphthong
 * The double inverted breve below indicates a syllable boundary between vowels
 * The undertie is used for prosody
 * The inverted undertie is used for prosody.

Differences from IPA
A major difference is that IPA notation distinguishes between phonetic and phonemic transcription by enclosing the transcription between either brackets or slashes. UPA instead used italics for the former and half bold font for the latter.

For phonetic transcription, numerous small differences from IPA come into relevance:
 * UPA e, o denote mid vowels with no particular bias towards open or close, as are found in most Uralic languages. IPA, denote close-mid vowels in particular, common in Romance and West Germanic languages.
 * Being designed for languages largely featuring vowel harmony, UPA has no simple way to denote a basic, backness-ambiguous schwa sound, IPA . ' denotes a reduced form of e, corresponding with IPA . A further backing diacritic must be appended, resulting in '. (This may also stand for a reduced form of , corresponding with IPA ; a distinction rarely encountered in practice.)
 * For the voiced dental fricative, UPA uses a Greek delta ', while IPA uses the letter eth . In UPA, eth ' stands for an alveolar tap, IPA.
 * UPA uses Greek chi χ for the voiceless velar fricative. In IPA, stands for a voiceless uvular fricative, while the velar counterpart is  (a symbol unused in UPA).
 * UPA uses small caps for voiceless or devoiced sounds (…), while in IPA, these frequently occur as distinct basic characters denoting entirely separate sounds (e.g. ).
 * UPA does not systematically distinguish approximants from fricatives. j may stand for both the palatal approximant (IPA ) or the voiced palatal fricative (IPA ), v may stand for both the labiodental approximant (IPA ) or the voiced labiodental fricative (IPA ), β may stand for the bilabial approximant (IPA ), the voiced bilabial fricative (IPA ), or in broad transcription even the labiovelar approximant (IPA ).
 * UPA lacks a series of palatal consonants: these must be transcribed by either palatalized alveolar or palatalized velar symbols. Thus  may correspond to either IPA or.

Examples:

Encoding
The IETF language tags register fonupa as a subtag for text in this notation.

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