Finnish orthography


Finnish orthography is based on the Latin script, and uses an alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, officially comprising 29 letters but also has two additional letters found in some loanwords. The Finnish orthography strives to represent all morphemes phonologically and, roughly speaking, the sound value of each letter tends to correspond with its value in the International Phonetic Alphabet – although some discrepancies do exist.

Alphabet

The following table describes how each letter in the Finnish alphabet is spelled and pronounced separately. If the name of a consonant begins with a vowel, it can be pronounced and spelled either as a monosyllabic or bisyllabic word. In practice, the names of the letters are rarely spelled, as people usually just type the glyph when they want to refer to a particular letter.
The pronunciation instructions enclosed in slashes are broad transcriptions based on the IPA system. In notes, more narrow transcriptions are enclosed in square brackets.
GlyphsNameName pronunciationNotes on usage
A, aaa
B, bbeeOccurs in relatively new loanwords, such as banaani 'banana' and bussi 'bus'. Typically pronounced as or.
C, cseeOccurs in unestablished loanwords, such as curry and cesium. Typically pronounced as or.
D, ddeeIn present standard language, d stands for, but it may be pronounced as or, and the pronunciation in dialects varies greatly. Natively used in Western dialects as and not at all in Eastern dialects.
E, eeeThe precise pronunciation tends to be between and.
F, fäf, äffä,, occasionally Occurs in relatively new loanwords, such as asfaltti 'asphalt' or uniformu 'uniform'. Historically and in dialectal pronunciation, is typically replaced with or medially . Even newer loanwords may have an alternative spelling where v has replaced f.
G, ggeeOccurs natively in the digraph ng, which marks the long velar nasal . Otherwise g only occurs in relatively new loanwords, such as gaala 'gala' and geeni 'gene'. Typically pronounced or .
H, hhooNormally a voiceless fricative, but the precise pronunciation depends on the preceding vowel; between two vowels may be pronounced as breathy-voiced.
I, iii
J, jjiiWithout exception , as in German and Swedish, never fricative or affricate as in French or English.
K, kkoo
L, läl, ällä,, occasionally
M, mäm, ämmä,, occasionally
N, nän, ännä,, occasionally
O, oooThe precise pronunciation tends to be between and.
P, ppee
Q, qkuuMainly occurs in foreign proper names. Typically pronounced as, though some speakers mispronounce it as.
R, rär, ärrä,, occasionally
S, säs, ässä,, occasionally
T, tteeThe precise pronunciation tends to be dental rather than alveolar.
U, uuuThe precise pronunciation tends to be between and.
V, vveeTypically pronounced as approximant rather than fricative.
W, wkaksois-vee,
tupla-vee		,
,
The "double-v" may occur natively as an archaic variant of v, but otherwise in unestablished loanwords and foreign proper names only. It occurs in some rare surnames such as Waltari or in some rare first names such as Werner. In collation the letter w is treated like v. Typically pronounced.
X, xäks, äksä, , occasionally /eks/Occurs in unestablished loanwords, such as taxi or fax, but there is often a preferred alternative where x has been replaced with digraph ks. Typically pronounced as.
Y, yyyThe precise pronunciation tends to be between and.
Z, ztset, tseta,,, Occurs in unestablished loanwords, such as zeniitti 'zenith' or pizza, but there may be an alternative spelling with ts. Typically pronounced , but sometimes as or.
Å, åruotsalainen oo, The "Swedish o", carried over from the Swedish alphabet and redundant in Finnish; retained especially for writing Finland-Swedish proper names. Pronounced as. All Finnish words containing å are names; there it is pronounced .
Ä, äää
Ö, öööThe precise pronunciation tends to be between and.

In addition, w is sometimes listed separately and after v, although officially it is merely a variant of the latter and can be alphabetized as v. Similarly, š and ž are variants of s and z, but they are often overlooked, as they are only used in some relatively new loanwords and foreign names, and may be replaced with sh and zh, respectively, if it is technically impossible to reproduce š and ž. The Finnish keyboard layout does not include š or ž; thus, in practice, only highly formal sources such as official texts, encyclopedias or Helsingin Sanomat use them.
GlyphsNameName pronunciationNotes on usage
Š, šhattu-äs,
hattu-ässä;
suhu-äs,
suhu-ässä		,
;
,
The "s with caron" is a rare variant of s. It occurred in some relatively new loanwords, such as šakki 'chess' and šillinki 'shilling', but is often replaced with digraph sh or, in more established loanwords, with plain s. In theory pronounced as but in practice often as.
Ž, žhattu-tset,
hattu-tseta		,
The "z with caron" is a rare variant of z. It occurs in some unestablished loanwords, such as džonkki 'junk', and foreign proper names, but is often replaced with digraph zh. In theory pronounced as but the actual pronunciation may vary.

The extra letters ''Ä'' and ''Ö''

The main peculiarities in the Finnish alphabet are the two extra vowel letters ä and ö. In Finnish, these extra letters are collectively referred to as the ääkköset when they need to be distinguished from the ISO basic Latin alphabet; the word is a somewhat playful modification of aakkoset, which is the Finnish for the alphabet as a whole. Another informal term is skandit or skandimerkit, which is short for skandinaaviset merkit "Scandinavian characters".
In Finnish, the letters ä, ö and y are the "front vowel" counterparts to the "back vowel" letters a, o and u — grammatical endings and word suffixes using these letters will use either the front or back form depending on the vowel harmony of the word they are affixed to. The glyphs for ä and ö are derived from the similar looking German umlauted letters, but as with y versus u, they are considered letters in their own right and thus alphabetized separately.
The Germanic umlaut or convention of considering digraph ae equivalent to ä, and oe equivalent to ö is inapplicable in Finnish. Moreover, in Finnish, both ae and oe are vowel sequences, not single letters, and they have independent meanings.
In handwritten text, the actual form of the extra marking may vary from a pair of dots to a pair of short vertical bars, to a single horizontal bar, or to a wavy line resembling a tilde. In practice, almost any diacritic situated above the base glyph would probably be interpreted as a carelessly written pair of dots. However, in computerized character sets, these alternatives are incorrect. The front-vowel counterpart of u using the glyph y rather than ü is carried over from Swedish, and additionally avoids confusion in cursive script with ii, which is common in Finnish.

Non-native letters in the Finnish alphabet

In the Finnish writing system, some basic Latin letters are considered redundant, and other letters generally represent sounds that are not inherent in the Finnish language. Thus, they are not used in established Finnish words, but they may occur in newer loanwords as well as in foreign proper names, and they are included in the Finnish alphabet in order to maintain interlingual compatibility. The pronunciation of these letters varies quite a lot.
In Finnish, words are ordered alphabetically according to the collation rules specified in the official standard SFS 4600. There are a few cases where Finnish collation is different from the rules applied in English:
Diacritics are never added to letters in native Finnish words. Generally, diacritics are retained in foreign-language proper names, e.g. Vilén, if possible, but when arranging words alphabetically, diacritics are usually ignored. There are, however, some exceptions:
The standard does not specify how one should alphabetize the letter ü when used in other languages than German, but at least as regards the Estonian or Hungarian ü, it seems consistent to treat it as equivalent to y. It would seem problematic, however, to apply the same principle to e.g. ü as used in Spanish or õ as used in Portuguese, as these letters represent quite different orthographic traditions.
Other special cases:
Ligatures are alphabetized as two individual letters:
Letters and characters taken from other alphabets or writing systems are collated after Latin letters.

Orthographic principles

When writing Finnish, the foundational principle is that each letter stands for one sound and each sound is always represented by the same letter, within the bounds of a single morpheme. The most notable exception to this rule is the velar nasal, which does not have an allotted letter.

Short and long sounds

In Finnish, both vowels and consonants may be either short or long. A short sound is written with a single letter, and a long sound is written with a double letter. It is necessary to recognize the difference between such words as tuli 'fire', tuuli 'wind' and tulli 'customs'
In syllabification, a long consonant is always regarded as having a syllable break in the middle, but a long vowel is regarded as a single unit that functions as the nucleus of a syllable. Either a long or short vowel may occur in a stressed as well as unstressed syllable. The phonetic quality of a vowel remains the same regardless of whether the vowel is long or short, or whether it is stressed or unstressed.

Velar nasal

The velar nasal does not have a letter of its own. Natively, a short only occurs before, and it is simply written with n, as in kenkä 'shoe'. Since the alveolar nasal can not occur in such a position, can be seen as an allophone of. However, if the is weakened, the result is a long, or geminated, velar nasal that is written with digraph ng, as in kengät 'shoes'. The geminated is not an allophone of geminated, since minimal pairs do exist: kangas 'textile' vs. kannas 'isthmus'.
The treatment of the velar nasal in loanwords is highly inconsistent, often mixing the original spelling of the word with an applied Finnish pronunciation pattern. Englanti 'England' is pronounced , and even magneetti 'magnet' is pronounced – cf. a more specialized term diagnoosi 'diagnosis', and in a word-initial position gnuu 'gnu'. Following the typical Finnish pronunciation pattern, kongestio ':wikt:congestion|congestion' is often pronounced, but may also occur.

Voiced plosives

Traditionally, and are not counted as Finnish phonemes, since they only appear in loanwords. However, these borrowings being relatively common, they are nowadays considered part of the educated norm. The failure to use them correctly is sometimes ridiculed, e.g. if a news reporter or a high official consistently and publicly pronounces Belgia 'Belgium' as. Even many educated speakers, however, still make no distinction between voiced and voiceless plosives in regular speech, although minimal pairs exist: 'bus' vs. 'bag', 'gorilla' vs. 'with/at a basket'.
The status of is somewhat different from and, since it appears in native Finnish words, too, as a regular "weak" correspondence of the voiceless , and even in the infinitives of many verbs, such as syödä, "to eat". At the time when Mikael Agricola, the "father" of literary Finnish, devised a system for writing the language, this sound still had the value of the voiced dental fricative, as in English "then". Since neither Swedish nor German of that time had a separate sign for this sound, Agricola chose to mark it with d or dh.
Later on, the sound developed in a variety of ways in different Finnish dialects: it was deleted, or became a hiatus, a flap consonant, or any of t, r, l, j, jj, th. For example, of your water could be:
In the middle of the 19th century, a significant portion of the Swedish-speaking upper class in Finland decided that Finnish had to be made equal in usage to Swedish. They even started using Finnish as their home language, even while very few of them really mastered it well. Since the historical no more had a common way of pronunciation between different Finnish dialects and since it was usually written as d, many started using the Swedish pronunciation, which eventually became the educated norm.
Initially, few native speakers of Finnish acquired the foreign plosive realisation of the native phoneme. Still some decades ago it was not entirely exceptional to hear loanwords like deodorantti 'deodorant' pronounced as, while native Finnish words with a were pronounced in the usual dialectal way. Nowadays, the Finnish language spoken by native Swedish speakers is not anymore considered paradigmatic, but as a result of their long-lasting prestige, many people particularly in the capital district acquired the new sound. Due to diffusion of the standard language through mass media and basic education, and due to the dialectal prestige of the capital area, the plosive can now be heard in all parts of the country, at least in loanwords and in formal speech. Nowadays replacing with a is considered rustic, for example instead of 'now we could use a new directive'.
Väinö Linna uses d as a hallmark of unpleasant command language in the novel The Unknown Soldier. Lieutenant Lammio was a native Helsinkian, and his language was considered haughty upper-class speech. On the other hand, private Asumaniemi's d raised no irritation, as he spoke Helsinki slang as his everyday speech.
In Helsinki slang, the slang used by some, more rarely nowadays, in Helsinki, the voiced stops are found in native words even in positions which are not the result of consonant gradation, e.g. 's/he walked', 'to understand'. In the Southwestern dialects of Rauma-Eurajoki-Laitila area,, and are commonplace, since the voicing of nasals spread to phonemes, and, making them half-voiced, e.g. ← sentään or ← niin kuin. They are also found in those coastal areas where Swedish influenced the speech.