Uralic Phonetic Alphabet

The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA, English Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, Finnish Suomalais - ugrilainen tarkekirjoitus ) is an extension of the Latin alphabet for phonetic transcription (linguistics) spoken languages ​​that is based on a 1901 published by the Finnish linguist and later politician Eemil Nestor Setälä proposal. It is in the works of the early 20th century (prior to the general distribution of the IPA), but still used today in the tradition of such work in the Uralic. Unlike the IPA, it is not standardized, so that in case of individual authors can find variations or additional letters.

The alphabet used in addition to the letters of the Latin alphabet, Greek and Cyrillic letters and superscript letters in their own importance. Other characters are predominantly formed by existing letters of the lead set by 90 ° or 180 ° are applied, or that they are partially ground off so that the pressure will see only a part of the original letter. This could be a great character set can be achieved without the creation of special ( and therefore more expensive ) metal type briefs.

In 2002, the need for UPA and its variants signs have been included in Unicode. They are found mainly in the Phonetic Extensions block.