The Udmurt alphabet consists of 38 letters, five more than in Russian. The additional letters not found in Russian are the consonants , and , and the vowels and , giving a total of 24 consonants, 12 vowels, and 2 pronunciation letters. The letter Ê is considered a semi-consonant, because it represents the palatalized sound which is a partial closure of the speech organs.

The vowels are like a, e, i, o and u in English, except that Udmurt has a hard vowel and a soft vowel for each one of our English vowels, a middle-sound for i, and a sound resembling the German o-Umlaut. To distinguish a spoken sound from a written letter or word in this grammatical overview, transliterated sounds are enclosed in square brackets [ ] and letters or words used as examples are shown in italics. The English letter [i], in smaller type, is used in this dictionary together with another vowel to transliterate the "soft" or palatalized vowels and the Udmurt Ê, in order to differentiate the pronunciation from the English letter [y] which is used to transliterate the Udmurt Ù, a "hard" or unpalatalized vowel. No Cyrillic-to-English transliteration system is adequate, because the English alphabet does not have enough letters. Therefore the apostrophe ( ) is used to transliterate the soft-sign, and the backwards apostrophe ( ) for the hard-sign.

As the table below shows, all the sounds or "phonemes" of the Udmurt language exist in spoken English as well (although we may not always hear the difference between the sounds [sh ] and [sh] as in shut and fresh), and we must often use more than one letter to represent these sounds. Two phonemes in Udmurt require two letters, ÚØ and ÓØ when followed by a hard vowel, and are transliterated as [zh ] and [sh ], but if they are followed by a soft vowel: ÚÉÎ devil and ÓÉ eat , they only require one letter.

Thus one can say that each phoneme in the Udmurt language can be represented by one letter in the alphabet, in its written context, so that "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) - you pronounce it just as you see it. The following table the order of the Udmurt alphabet, its transliteration, and the approximate English sounds of the letters: