What ᵠ means
Select standalone ᵠ in a Unicode character picker. This superscript phi is a separate character used in Uralic phonetic writing; styling ordinary φ changes only its appearance.
What does ᵠ mean in phonetic writing?
In the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA), raised ᵠ marks a very short sound. It can also represent a transition vowel, so its height carries meaning.
The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, a way to write sounds in Uralic languages such as Finnish, grew from Finno-Ugric transcription work in the 1890s. Finnish linguist Eemil Nestor Setälä formalized it in 1901. It was made to record speech precisely, compare sound systems, trace word histories, and reconstruct earlier language forms. It spread in later Uralic scholarship and related linguistic work.
Specialist notation for phonetic transcription, not a decorative small phi.
Don’t replace it with φ: a raised appearance alone doesn’t make it the same character.
Don't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
1Why does ᵠ look like psi in Calibri?
A 2019 report said Calibri rendered ᵠ like the Greek letter psi, ψ. That was a font display issue, not a different character.
How to type ᵠ
ᵠ\1D60Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.