What ᵢ means
The subscript i marks co-articulation in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA). UPA is a way to write sounds from languages in the Uralic family. Co-articulation means one sound affects how a neighboring sound is made.
In UPA, a subscript letter signals that effect from the sound before or after the base letter. Its superscript counterpart ⁱ marks very short sounds, so changing the vertical position changes the reading.
Setälä's UPA proposal appeared in 1901 to record fine detail in Uralic speech. A 2002 Unicode proposal describes UPA as spreading beyond its early European use and argues that plain-text characters preserve its meaningful distinctions. As of 2022, the Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages, a reference book about this language family, uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for some modern descriptions while retaining traditional FUT/UPA notation for reconstructed forms—sounds inferred from linguistic evidence.
Specialist phonetic notation used for precise sound descriptions.
In UPA, position carries meaning; do not substitute baseline i or superscript ⁱ.
Part of the collection
Who writes ᵢ
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Don't confuse it with
2
Questions people ask
2Is ᵢ an IPA symbol?
No. As of September 2026, ᵢ is not an IPA symbol; it is used in UPA phonetic notation, where the system's rules determine its reading.
Why does ᵢ show as a box?
The font may not contain ᵢ, so it can show an empty box, a blank, or a fallback glyph. Use a font that includes the character.
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How to type or find ᵢ
- Search it as
- subscript i · subscript letter i · ᵢ · Uralic Phonetic Alphabet · UPA · FUT · phonetic transcription
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ᵢ\1D62\_i and press Tab; as of September 2026, the completion inserts ᵢ.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.