There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages currently identified by UNESCO, one third of these languages are not making use of any established writing system, few thousands of those are classified as endangered languages. To this day, many of those languages are still lacking the possibility of being fully transcribed for the purposes of language processing.
The Symbolic Phonetic Notation (SPN) is a set of phonetic notation symbols developed by Kalmasoft with the sole purpose of preserving such unwritten languages in mind by reproducing their sound in a manageable way; preserving the phonological charactersitics of any targeted language by representing its different linguistic aspects can be made easily by electronically processing its intermediate representation using SPN which fits easily for such purposes, it can also be fully manageable programmatically or by any other well defined analytical means.
SPN symbols were carefully designed to represent the position of the speech organs in articulating various speech sounds as precise and intuitive as possible, the notation system is composed of symbols that are easy to memorize and write though not as comprehensive compared to the current complex IPA symbols for example, SPN symbols simply depict the positions of the tongue and lips and the other articulatory organs as they produce the sound, hence it is a phonetic notation.
SPN is not meant to serve as a writing system and should not be dealt with as such, it is rather a "utility set of symbols" that do not stand by themselves for any specific language and should not be considered as a "writing system", in order to have a complete linguistic solution for any arbitrary target language, a separately designed writing system is highly recommended.
All SPN symbols are assigned in the range EC00-EDFF of the Unicode Private Use Area, so the only way to access or view the symbols is by using the font from within the desktop applications e.g. text editors/word processors or by any other suitable programming solution.
| Symbol: the phonetic symbol | IPA: International Phonetic Alphabet corresponding symbol |
| Name: symbol name | Articulation: this include both place and manner of articulation, and phonation |
| Description: phonetic description | Unicode: Private Use Area code point |
The table shown below contains non-standard Unicode characters in the column "Font". Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of the correct intended characters, this web page uses SPN truetype font which may or may not work properly on your browser, an image copy of the same symbols are included in the column "Symbol" for reference just in case the characters do not appear correctly.
You may download the SPN font from our download page lingual support page for your testing purposes. |
| ID | Symbol | Font | Name | Description | IPA | Articulation | Unicode | Remarks |
| 001 |  |
| A | open front unrounded vowel | /a/ | vowel | U+EC00 | |
| 002 |  |
| E | open-mid front unrounded vowel | /ɛ/ | vowel | U+EC0A | |
| 003 |  |
| I | close front unrounded vowel | /i/ | vowel | U+EC14 | |
| 004 |  |
| O | open-mid back unrounded vowel | /ɔ/ | vowel | U+EC1E | |
| 005 |  |
U | close back rounded vowel | /u/ | vowel | U+EC28 | ||
| 006 |  |
WA | voiced labio-velar approximant | /w/ | U+EC32 | |||
| 007 |  |
| YA | Close front rounded vowel | /j/ | U+EC3C | ||
| 008 |  |
| glottal stop | /ʔ/ | U+EC46 | Arabic Hamza (ء) | ||
| 009 |  |
| HA | voiceless glottal fricative | /h/ | U+EC50 | ||
| 010 |  |
| HHA | voiceless pharyngeal fricative | /ħ/ | U+EC5A | Arabic Haa' (ح) | |
| 011 |  |
| voiced pharyngeal fricative | /ʕ/ | U+EC64 | Arabic 'Ain (ع) | ||
| 012 |  |
| GA | voiced velar stop | /g/ | velar | U+EC6E | |
| 013 |  |
| KA | voiceless velar stop | /k/ | velar | U+EC78 | |
| 014 |  |
| GHA | Voiced velar fricative | /ɣ/ | veral | U+EC82 | |
| 015 |  |
| KHA | voiceless velar fricative | /x/ | velar | U+EC8C | |
| 016 |  |
| NGA | voiced velar nasal | /ŋ/ | velar | U+EC96 | |
| 017 |  |
| NJA | voiced palatal nasal | /ɲ/ | velar | U+ECA0 | |
| 018 |  |
| QA | voiceless uvular stop | /q/ | velar | U+ECAA | Amharic (ቀ) |
| 019 |  |
voiceless alveolar affricate | /c/ | U+ECB4 | ||||
| 020 |  |
| JA | voiced palatoalveolar affricate | /ʤ/ | palatal | U+ECBE | |
| 021 |  |
| CHA | voiceless palatoalveolar sibilant affricate | /tʃ/ | palatal | U+ECC8 | |
| 022 |  |
| SHA | voiceless postalveolar fricative | /ʃ/ | palatal | U+ECD2 | |
| 023 |  |
| RA | voiced alveolar trill | /r/ | retroflex | U+ECDC | |
| 024 |  |
| DA | voiced alveolar stop | /d/ | dental | U+ECE6 | |
| 025 |  |
| LA | alveolar lateral approximant | /l/ | dental | U+ECF0 | |
| 026 |  |
| NA | voiced alveolar nasal | /n/ | dental | U+ECFA | |
| 027 |  |
| SA | voiceless alveolar fricative | /s/ | dental | U+ED04 | |
| 028 |  |
| SSA | voiceless alveolar sibilant | /sˁ/ | dental | U+ED0E | Arabic Saad (ص) |
| 029 |  |
| TA | voiceless alveolar stop | /t/ | dental | U+ED18 | |
| 030 |  |
| DDA | voiceless alveolar stop | /ðˁ/ | dental | U+ED22 | |
| 031 |  |
| DHA | voiced dental fricative | /ð/ | dental | U+ED2C | |
| 032 |  |
| DDHA | voiced dental fricative/voiced alveolar sibilant | /ðˁ/ | dental | U+ED36 | |
| 033 |  |
| ZA | voiced alveolar fricative | /z/ | dental | U+ED40 | |
| 034 |  |
| ZHA | voiced alveolo-palatal fricative | /ʑ/ | U+ED4A | ||
| 035 |  |
| THA | voiceless dental fricative | /θ/ | dental | U+ED54 | |
| 036 |  |
| TSA | voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate | /ts/ | U+ED5E | ||
| 037 |  |
| TTA | /tˁ/ | dental | U+ED68 | Arabic Taa' (ط) | |
| 038 |  |
| VA | voiced labiodental fricative | /v/ | labiodental | U+ED72 | |
| 039 |  |
| FA | voiceless labiodental fricative | /f/ | labial | U+ED7C | |
| 040 |  |
| MA | voiced bilabial nasal | /m/ | labial | U+ED86 | |
| 041 |  |
| BA | voiced bilabial fricative | /b/ | velar | U+ED90 | |
| 042 |  |
| PA | voiceless bilabial stop | /p/ | labial | U+ED9A | |
| 043 |  |
| Double vowel | ː | U+EDA4 | Long vowel |