Karelian alphabet are from the ISO basic Latin alphabet, five are derived from basic Latin letters by the addition of diacritical marks, and the final character is the apostrophe, which signifies palatalization of the preceding sound. The entire range of sounds of native Karelian words is intended to be represented by this set of characters. This unified alphabet was approved in 2007 as a replacement for the separate Olonets Karelian and Karelian Proper alphabets. The letters Ä and Ö are vowels which, unlike the German umlauts, are considered to be distinct and are alphabetized separately from the corresponding vowels without the umlauts.
Cardinal vowels Cardinal vowels Cardinal vowels are a set of reference vowels used by phoneticians in describing the sounds of languages. For instance, the vowel of the English word "feet" can be described with reference to cardinal vowel 1, , which is the cardinal vowel closest to it. It is often stated that to be able to use the cardinal vowel system effectively one must undergo training with an expert phonetician, working both on the recognition and the production of the vowels. Daniel Jones wrote "The values of cardinal vowels cannot be learnt from written descriptions; they should be learnt by oral