The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA), also known as Finno-Ugric Transcription (FUT), is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. It is especially developed as a notational standard for the phonemic and phonetic representation of the Uralic languages. Phonetic transcription (or phonetic notation) is the visual system of symbolization of the sounds occuring in spoken human language. ... In phonetics and phonology, a phone is a speech sound considered as a physical event without regard to its place in the sound system semantics of a language. ... In spoken language, a phoneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words (that is, changing a phoneme in a word, produces another word, that has a different meaning). ... In spoken language, a phoneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words (that is, changing a phoneme in a word, produces another word, that has a different meaning). ... Phonetics (from the Greek word phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Geographical distribution of Samoyedic, Finnic, Ugric and Yukaghir languages The Uralic languages form a language family of about 30 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. ...