Modifier Letter Small Turned I

It marks a short, secondary i-like element in some phonetic transcriptions.

The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) and related Finno-Ugric transcription traditions use ᵎ for a reduced or transitional vowel element; the exact value depends on the system's key.

Linguist Setälä's 1901 examples belong to the wider Uralic transcription tradition; they do not date the first use of ᵎ itself. UPA was developed to record the sounds, sound patterns and word histories of Uralic languages such as Finnish and Hungarian. In its notation, a raised letter can mark a brief element and a turned form can mark reduction.

How do I type ᵎ?

A UPA keyboard is the documented specialist input route.

A dictionary project documenting the Mordvin languages, part of the Uralic family, lists a UPA keyboard for PC and Mac alongside a phonetic font. It also records ᵎ͐, a turned-i modifier followed by a combining right-arrowhead-above mark. If a font or text pipeline drops that mark, the sequence loses part of its notation.

ᵎ has no universal sound value

A 2004 modifier-letter proposal describes raised vowel letters as secondary parts of diphthongs or very short syllable nuclei. It links the convention to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Americanist transcription, while noting that strict IPA may write the same sequence differently.

A Unicode proposal on Romance dialect transcription documents turned a, e and i as centralized vowels, and notes that turned-i forms may take combining marks below. This is a separate, system-specific convention, not a universal reading for ᵎ.