Modifier Letter Small Turned A

UPA, also called Finno-Ugric transcription, records details of Uralic languages, including Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian. A Unicode proposal in 2002 described it as more than a century old: first used chiefly in Finland, Hungary, Estonia, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Russia, it was used worldwide by then.

The proposal cited a 1902 paper on transcribing Finno-Ugric languages. In UPA, raised letters mark very short or transitional sounds, while turned letters mark reduction. It argued that distinct text characters preserve sound distinctions for search and sorting better than superscript styling alone.