Finnish orthography

Finnish orthography is based on the Latin script, and uses an alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, officially comprising twenty-nine letters but also including 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 (IPA) – although some discrepancies do exist.

Alphabet

The following table describes how each letter in the Finnish alphabet (Finnish: ) is spelled and pronounced separately. If the name of a consonant begins with a vowel (usually ), 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 (uppercase or lowercase) 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.

In addition, is sometimes listed separately and after , although officially it is merely a variant of the latter and can be alphabetized as . Similarly, and are variants of and , but they are often overlooked, as they are only used in some relatively new loanwords and foreign names, and may be replaced with and , respectively, if it is technically impossible to reproduce and .This rule is stated in the standard SFS 4900 (Transliteration of Cyrillic characters: Slavic languages), p. 7. The Finnish keyboard layout does not include or ; thus, in practice, only highly formal sources such as official texts, encyclopedias or Helsingin Sanomat use them.

The extra letters ''Ä'' and ''Ö''

The main peculiarities in the Finnish alphabet are the two extra vowel letters and (accompanied by the Swedish , which is actually not needed for writing Finnish). In Finnish, these extra letters are collectively referred to as the when they need to be distinguished from the ISO basic Latin alphabet; the word is a somewhat playful modification of , which is the Finnish for the alphabet as a whole. Another informal term is or , which is short for "Scandinavian characters" (however, the Danish and Norwegian variants '' æ'' and '' ø'' are usually not taken into account).

In Finnish, the letters , and are the "front vowel" counterparts to the "back vowel" letters , and — 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 and are derived from the similar looking German umlauted letters, but as with versus , they are considered letters in their own right and thus alphabetized separately (after ).

The Germanic umlaut or convention of considering digraph equivalent to , and equivalent to is inapplicable in Finnish. Moreover, in Finnish, both and are vowel sequences, not single letters, and they have independent meanings (e.g. "I seek" vs. "he, she").

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 (for example, ) 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 using the glyph rather than ''ü'' is carried over from Swedish, and additionally avoids confusion in cursive script with , 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.

* The redundant letters are often replaced with more common alternatives in Finnish, except in proper names. They include ''c'' (which may be replaced with either or ), ''q'' (which is usually replaced with , and particularly ''qu'' with ), and ''x'' (which is replaced with ). In addition, the Swedish is redundant from the Finnish point of view, as its pronunciation is more or less equivalent to the Finnish way of pronouncing . It is officially included in the Finnish alphabet so that keyboards etc. would be compatible with Swedish, which is one of the two official languages in Finland, as well as for the reproduction of Swedish proper names, which are quite common in Finland, even as surnames of monolingual speakers of Finnish.
* The letters representing foreign sounds can be found in relatively new loanwords, but in more established loanwords they have been replaced with alternatives that better reflect the typical Finnish pronunciation, e.g. 'coffee', 'beard'. The letters include , , and (which is also used to mark the inherent velar nasal , however). From a historical point of view, even could be said to belong to this group, but the sound has long been an established part of standard language.
* The letters and could be classified into both of the aforementioned groups. The sound is not regarded as a phoneme in Finnish, but historically was used to mark (or, rather, ), as in Dutch, German or Polish. Although this is today considered archaic and is used instead, may still occur in some old surnames as a variant of . Occasionally this can also be applied for faux-archaic effect, as in "Ye Olde Harbour". Likewise, the z is not native to Finnish, but (or ) was formerly used to denote (as in German). It is still often pronounced , but its pronunciation varies greatly: some speakers may pronounce it , or sometimes .
* The letters and (''s'' and ''z'' with caron) are officially recommended instead of and for transliteration from another alphabet, although in practice, and are often used. For example, Russian (transcribed ''Brezhnev'' in English) is transliterated . However, these sounds are foreign to the Finnish language, the letters do not appear on Finnish keyboards and their pronunciation is not consistent. The sound is familiar to most Finnish speakers and quite commonly used in many loanwords, e.g. 'chess', , but is restricted to foreign words only.

Collation order

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:

* '' å'', '' ä'' and '' ö'' are regarded as distinct letters and collated after '' z''
* '' w'' is generally regarded as equivalent to '' v'' (in a multilingual context it may, however, be collated separately after ''v'', as in English).

Diacritics are never added to letters in native Finnish words (as the dots above the Finnish graphemes ''ä'' and ''ö'' are not considered diacritics). Generally, diacritics are retained in foreign-language proper names, e.g. '' Vilén'', if possible, but when arranging words alphabetically, diacritics are usually ignored (this also applies to '' š'' and '' ž'', despite them being an officially recognized part of Finnish orthography). There are, however, some exceptions:

* German and Turkish '' ü'' and Hungarian '' ű'' are alphabetized as ''y'', not as ''u''
* Danish and Norwegian '' ø'', Estonian '' õ'' and Hungarian ''ő'' are alphabetized as ''ö'', not as ''o''.

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'' (and even more so, since ''ü'' in Estonian and Hungarian is not considered a mere variant of ''u'', as it is in German). It would seem problematic, however, to apply the same principle to e.g. ''ü'' ( u-diaeresis) as used in Spanish or ''õ'' (nasal vowel) as used in Portuguese language, Portuguese, as these letters represent quite different orthography, orthographic traditions.

Other special cases:

* Sami '' ŋ'' (''eng'') is alphabetized as '' n''
* Sami '' đ'' (''d'' with stroke) and Icelandic '' ð'' (eth) are alphabetized as '' d''
* Icelandic '' þ'' (''thorn'') is alphabetized as ''th''
* Polish '' ł'' (''l'' with stroke) is alphabetized as '' l''.

Ligatures are alphabetized as two individual letters:

* '' æ'' is alphabetized as ''ae'' (not as ''ä'')
* '' œ'' is alphabetized as ''oe'' (not as ''ö'')
* '' ß'' is alphabetized as ''ss''.

Letters and characters taken from other alphabets (e.g. Σ 'Greek capital letter sigma') 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 ( digraph). It is necessary to recognize the difference between such words as 'fire', 'wind' and 'customs'
In syllabification, a long consonant is always regarded as having a syllable break in the middle (as in ), but a long vowel (or a diphthong) 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 (generally referred to as 'the eng sound') does not have a letter of its own. Natively, a short only occurs before , and it is simply written with , as in 'shoe'. Since the alveolar nasal can not occur in such a position, can be seen as an allophone of . However, if the is weakened (because of a phenomenon called consonant gradation that occurs when the word is inflected), the result is a long, or geminated, velar nasal that is written with digraph , as in 'shoes'. The geminated is not an allophone of geminated , since minimal pairs do exist: 'textile' vs. '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. "England" is pronounced (with a short but no ), and even "magnet" is pronounced (with plain being pronounced as when followed by , as in classical Latin) – cf. a more specialized term 'diagnosis', and in a word-initial position "gnu". Following the typical Finnish pronunciation pattern, " 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 '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 (as a result of consonant gradation), and even in the infinitives of many verbs, such as , "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 or .

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 , , , . For example historical and rare dialectal , "our" ''(gen.),'' "hand" ''(gen.)'' could be:

* ,
* ,
* ,
* (rare) ,

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 , 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 '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 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 (another native Helsinkian) 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' (← native verb root ), 'to understand' (← Russian понимать). 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. ← or ← . They are also found in those coastal areas where Swedish influenced the speech.

The spelling alphabet

References

External links

Omniglot: writing systems and languages of the world: Finnish




(compared to English, IPA available)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Finnish Alphabet
Finnish language
Latin-script orthographies