Finnish alphabet
Encyclopedia
The Finnish alphabet is based on the Latin script, and especially the Swedish alphabet
. Officially it comprises 28 letters:
A
, B
, C
, D
, E
, F
, G
, H
, I
, J
, K
, L
, M
, N
, O
, P
, Q
, R
, S
, T
, U
, V
, X
, Y
, Z
, Å
, Ä
, Ö
In addition, w
is traditionally listed 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.
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
(usually ä [æ]), 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 then 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).
Finnish has true mid vowels (e, ö, and o) and thus there exists no distinction between close-mid and open-mid vowels as in e.g. /e/ vs. /ɛ/.
The main peculiarities in the Finnish alphabet are the two extra vowel
letters ä and ö (accompanied by the Swedish å, which is actually not needed for writing Finnish). In Finnish, these extra letters are collectively referred to as the ääkköset when they need to be distinguished from the 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 "Scandinavia
n characters" (however, the Danish
and Norwegian
variants æ
and ø
are usually not taken into account).
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 suffices using these letters will use either the front or back form depending on the vowel harmony of the word they are affixed to. The glyph
s 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 (after z).
As Finnish is unrelated to Germanic languages, 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 (e.g. haen "I seek" vs. hän "he, she"). If ä and ö are not available because of technical limitations, they are replaced by a and o.
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, á ā ã) would probably be interpreted as a carelessly written pair of dots (ä). 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.
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 loanword
s 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.
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 (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:
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
, 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 (e.g. Σ 'Greek capital letter sigma') or writing systems are collated after Latin letters.
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. 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
[ŋ], which does not have an allotted letter.
s and consonant
s 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 tuli /ˈtu.li/ 'fire', tuuli /ˈtuː.li/ 'wind' and tulli /ˈtul.li/ 'customs'
In syllabification
, a long consonant is always regarded as having a syllable break in the middle (as in /ˈtɑp.pɑː/), 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.
In pronunciation, a long vowel is regarded as a single phoneme, but when written as a digraph, it is collated
as formed of two individual letters.
/ŋ/ (generally referred to as äng-äänne 'the eng sound') does not have a letter of its own. Natively, a short /ŋ/ only occurs before /k/, and it is simply written with n, as in kenkä /ˈkeŋ.kæ/ 'shoe'. Since the alveolar nasal
/n/ can not occur in such a position, /ŋ/ can be seen as an allophone
of /n/. However, if the /k/ 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 /ŋː/ that is written with digraph
ng, as in kengät /ˈkeŋ.ŋæt/ 'shoes'. The geminated /ŋː/ is not an allophone of geminated /nː/, since minimal pair
s do exist: kangas /ˈkɑŋ.ŋɑs/ 'textile
' vs. kannas /ˈkɑn.nɑs/ '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 /ˈeŋ.lɑn.ti/ (with a short /ŋ/ but no /ɡ/), and even magneetti 'magnet
' is pronounced /ˈmɑŋ.neːt.ti/ (with plain g being pronounced as /ŋ/ when followed by n) – cf. a more specialized term diagnoosi /di.aɡ.noː.si/ 'diagnosis
', and in a word-initial position gnuu /ɡnuː/ 'gnu
'. Following the typical Finnish pronunciation pattern, kongestio 'congestion
' is often pronounced /ˈkoŋ.ŋes.ti.o/, but /ˈkoŋ.ɡes.ti.o/ may also occur.
' vs. /ˈpus.si/ 'bag', /ˈɡo.ril.lɑ/ 'gorilla
' vs. /ˈko.ril.lɑ/ 'with/at a basket
'.
The status of /d/ is somewhat different from /b/ and /ɡ/, since it appears in native Finnish words, too, as a regular "weak" correspondence of the voiceless /t/ (as a result of consonant gradation
), 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 /ð/, 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 */ð/ 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 (pl.) 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 */ð/ 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 [d], 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 /teotorantti/, while native Finnish words with a /d/ 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 [d] 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 [d] can now be heard in all parts of the country, at least in loanwords and in formal speech. Nowadays replacing /d/ with a /t/ is considered rustic, for example /nyt tarvittais uutta tirektiiviä/ instead of /nyt tarvittaisiin uutta direktiiviä/ '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 (another native Helsinkian) 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. /dallas/ 's/he walked' (← native verb root talla-), /bonjata/ 'to understand' (← Russian /ponʲiˈmatʲ/ понимать). In the Southwestern dialects of Rauma-Eurajoki-Laitila area, /b/, /d/ and /ɡ/ are commonplace, since the voicing of nasals spread to phonemes /p/, /t/ and /k/, making them half-voiced, e.g. /sendä/ ← sentään or /ninɡo/ ← niin kuin. They are also found in those coastal areas where Swedish influenced the speech.
Swedish alphabet
Modern Swedish is written with a 29-letter Latin alphabet:Prior to the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista in 2006, the letters and were collated together....
. Officially it comprises 28 letters:
A
A
A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :...
, B
B
B is the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds , most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.-History:...
, C
C
Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets...
, D
D
D is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the...
, E
E
E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:...
, F
F
F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The origin of ⟨f⟩ is the Semitic letter vâv that represented a sound like or . Graphically, it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club...
, G
G
G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,...
, H
H
H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts....
, I
I
I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound...
, J
J
Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic...
, K
K
K is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.-History and usage:In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA....
, L
L
Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet...
, M
M
M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water...
, N
N
N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet...
, O
O
O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a...
, P
P
P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Usage:In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words...
, Q
Q
Q is the seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic sound value of Qôp was , a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones...
, R
R
R is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ and Latin R...
, S
S
S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent...
, T
T
T is the 20th letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets...
, U
U
U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details....
, V
V
V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....
, X
X
X is the twenty-fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Uses:In mathematics, x is commonly used as the name for an independent variable or unknown value. The usage of x to represent an independent or unknown variable can be traced back to the Arabic word šay شيء = “thing,” used in Arabic...
, Y
Y
Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.-Name:In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing , which was not a native sound...
, Z
Z
Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal...
, Å
Å
Å represents various sounds in several languages. Å is part of the alphabets used for the Alemannic and the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German...
, Ä
Ä
"Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :...
, Ö
Ö
"Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut...
In addition, w
W
W is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V...
is traditionally listed 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.
Summary of the main characteristics
Finnish denotes the phonemic (meaning-distinguishing) gemination with simple digraphs, e.g. sika "pig" vs. siika "whitefish".The following table describes how each letter in the Finnish alphabet is spelled and pronounced separately. If the name of a consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
begins with a vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
(usually ä [æ]), 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 then want to refer to a particular letter.
The pronunciation instructions enclosed in slashes are broad transcriptions
Phonetic transcription
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds . The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, e.g., the International Phonetic Alphabet....
based on the IPA system (in notes, more narrow transcriptions are enclosed in square brackets).
Finnish has true mid vowels (e, ö, and o) and thus there exists no distinction between close-mid and open-mid vowels as in e.g. /e/ vs. /ɛ/.
| Glyphs | Spelling | Pronunciation | Notes on usage (for more, see Finnish phonology Finnish phonology Unless otherwise noted, statements in this article refer to Standard Finnish, which is based on the dialect spoken in Häme Province in central south Finland. Standard Finnish is used by professional speakers, such as the reporters and the news presenters on television.-Vowels:Phonetically, the... ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A A A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :... , a |
aa | /ɑː/ | |
| B B B is the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds , most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.-History:... , b |
bee | /beː/ | Occurs in relatively new loanwords, such as banaani 'banana Banana Banana is the common name for herbaceous plants of the genus Musa and for the fruit they produce. Bananas come in a variety of sizes and colors when ripe, including yellow, purple, and red.... ' and bussi 'bus Bus A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses; coaches are... '. Typically pronounced as [b̥] or [p]. |
| C C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets... , c |
see | /seː/ | Occurs in unestablished loanwords, such as curry Curry Curry is a generic description used throughout Western culture to describe a variety of dishes from Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Thai or other Southeast Asian cuisines... and cesium. Typically pronounced as [k] or [s]. |
| D D D is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the... , d |
dee | /deː/ | In present standard language, d stands for [d], but it may be pronounced as [d̥] or [t̪], and the pronunciation in dialects varies a lot. Natively used in Western dialects as [ɾ] and not at all in Eastern dialects. |
| E E E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:... , e |
ee | /eː/ | The precise pronunciation tends to be between [e] and [ɛ]. |
| F F F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The origin of ⟨f⟩ is the Semitic letter vâv that represented a sound like or . Graphically, it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club... , f |
äf, äffä | /æf/, /ˈæf.fæ/, occasionally /ef/ | Occurs in relatively new loanwords, such as asfaltti 'asphalt Asphalt Asphalt or , also known as bitumen, is a sticky, black and highly viscous liquid or semi-solid that is present in most crude petroleums and in some natural deposits, it is a substance classed as a pitch... ' or uniformu 'uniform Uniform A uniform is a set of standard clothing worn by members of an organization while participating in that organization's activity. Modern uniforms are worn by armed forces and paramilitary organizations such as police, emergency services, security guards, in some workplaces and schools and by inmates... '. Historically and in dialectal pronunciation (apart from some Western dialects), /f/ is typically replaced with /ʋ/ or medially /hʋ/ (e.g. kahvi /ˈkah.ʋi/ ← Swedish kaffe 'coffee Coffee Coffee is a brewed beverage with a dark,init brooo acidic flavor prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant, colloquially called coffee beans. The beans are found in coffee cherries, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia,... '). Even newer loanwords may have an alternative spelling where v has replaced f (asvaltti, univormu). |
| G G G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,... , g |
gee | /ɡeː/ | Occurs natively in the digraph ng, which marks the long velar nasal Velar nasal The velar nasal is the sound of ng in English sing. It is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N.... [ŋː] (with no [ɡ] sound). Otherwise g only occurs in relatively new loanwords, such as gaala 'gala Festival A festival or gala is an event, usually and ordinarily staged by a local community, which centers on and celebrates some unique aspect of that community and the Festival.... ' and geeni 'gene Gene A gene is a molecular unit of heredity of a living organism. It is a name given to some stretches of DNA and RNA that code for a type of protein or for an RNA chain that has a function in the organism. Living beings depend on genes, as they specify all proteins and functional RNA chains... '. Typically pronounced [ɡ̊] or [k]. |
| H H H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts.... , h |
hoo | /hoː/ | Normally a voiceless fricative, but the precise pronunciation depends on the preceding vowel; between two vowels may be pronounced as breathy-voiced Breathy voice Breathy voice is a phonation in which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal voicing, but are held further apart, so that a larger volume of air escapes between them. This produces an audible noise... [ɦ]. |
| I I I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound... , i |
ii | /iː/ | [i] |
| J J Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic... , j |
jii | /jiː/ | Without exception [j] (English consonant y), as in German and Swedish, never fricated or africated as in French or English. |
| K K K is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.-History and usage:In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA.... , k |
koo | /koː/ | |
| L L Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet... , l |
äl, ällä | /æl/, /ˈæl.læ/, occasionally /el/ | |
| M M M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water... , m |
äm, ämmä | /æm/, /ˈæm.mæ/, occasionally /em/ | |
| N N N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet... , n |
än, ännä | /æn/, /ˈæn.næ/, occasionally /en/ | |
| O O O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a... , o |
oo | /oː/ | The precise pronunciation tends to be between [o] and [ɔ]. |
| P P P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Usage:In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words... , p |
pee | /peː/ | |
| Q Q Q is the seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic sound value of Qôp was , a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones... , q |
kuu | /kuː/ | Mainly occurs in foreign proper names (in loanwords digraph Digraph (orthography) A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined... qu has often been replaced with kv). Typically pronounced as [k]. |
| R R R is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ and Latin R... , r |
är, ärrä | /ær/, /ˈær.ræ/, occasionally /er/ | |
| S S S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent... , s |
äs, ässä | /æs/, /ˈæs.sæ/, occasionally /es/ | |
| Š, š | hattu-äs, hattu-ässä; suhu-äs, suhu-ässä |
/ˈhattu.æs/, /ˈhattu.æssæ/; /ˈsuhu.æs/, /ˈsuhu.æssæ/ |
The "s with a hat" is a rare variant of s. It occurred in some relatively new loanwords, such as šakki 'chess Chess Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player... ' and šillinki 'shilling Shilling The shilling is a unit of currency used in some current and former British Commonwealth countries. The word shilling comes from scilling, an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. The word is thought to derive... ', but is often replaced with digraph Digraph (orthography) A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined... sh (šampoo → shampoo Shampoo Shampoo is a hair care product used for the removal of oils, dirt, skin particles, dandruff, environmental pollutants and other contaminant particles that gradually build up in hair... ) or, in more established loanwords, with plain s (sampoo). In theory pronounced as [ʃ] but in practice often as [s]. |
| T T T is the 20th letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets... , t |
tee | /teː/ | The precise pronunciation tends to be dental [t̪] rather than alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... [t]. |
| U U U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details.... , u |
uu | /uː/ | The precise pronunciation tends to be between [u] and [o]. |
| V V V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details.... , v |
vee | /ʋeː/ | Typically pronounced as approximant [ʋ] rather than fricative [v]. |
| W W W is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V... , w |
kaksois-vee, tupla-vee |
/ʋeː/, /ˈkɑk.soisˌʋeː/, /ˈtup.lɑˌʋeː/ |
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 (e.g. Mika Waltari Mika Waltari Mika Toimi Waltari was a Finnish writer, best known for his best-selling novel The Egyptian .- Early life :... , a world-famous author) or in some rare first names such as Werner (e.g. Werner Söderström, a well-known publisher). In collation Collation Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet... the letter w is treated like v. Typically pronounced [ʋ]. |
| X X X is the twenty-fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Uses:In mathematics, x is commonly used as the name for an independent variable or unknown value. The usage of x to represent an independent or unknown variable can be traced back to the Arabic word šay شيء = “thing,” used in Arabic... , x |
äks, äksä | /æks/, /ˈæk.sæ/, occasionally /eks/ | Occurs in unestablished loanwords, such as taxi Taxicab A taxicab, also taxi or cab, is a type of vehicle for hire with a driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice... or fax Fax Fax , sometimes called telecopying, is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material , normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device... , but there is often a preferred alternative where x has been replaced with digraph Digraph (orthography) A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined... ks (taksi, faksi). Typically pronounced as [ks]. |
| Y Y Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.-Name:In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing , which was not a native sound... , y |
yy | /yː/ | The precise pronunciation tends to be between [y] and [ø]. |
| Z Z Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal... , z |
tset, tseta | /tset/, /ˈtse.tɑ/ | Occurs in unestablished loanwords, such as zeniitti /tse.niːt.ti/ 'zenith Zenith The zenith is an imaginary point directly "above" a particular location, on the imaginary celestial sphere. "Above" means in the vertical direction opposite to the apparent gravitational force at that location. The opposite direction, i.e... ' or pizza Pizza Pizza is an oven-baked, flat, disc-shaped bread typically topped with a tomato sauce, cheese and various toppings.Originating in Italy, from the Neapolitan cuisine, the dish has become popular in many parts of the world. An establishment that makes and sells pizzas is called a "pizzeria"... , but there may be an alternative spelling with ts (e.g. pitsa). Typically pronounced [ts], but sometimes as [s] or [z̥]. |
| Ž, ž | hattu-tset, hattu-tseta |
/ˈhat.tuˌtset/, /ˈhat.tuˌtse.tɑ/ |
The "z with a hat" is a rare variant of z. It occurs in some unestablished loanwords, such as džonkki 'junk Junk (ship) A junk is an ancient Chinese sailing vessel design still in use today. Junks were developed during the Han Dynasty and were used as sea-going vessels as early as the 2nd century AD. They evolved in the later dynasties, and were used throughout Asia for extensive ocean voyages... ', and foreign proper names, but is often replaced with digraph Digraph (orthography) A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined... zh. In theory pronounced as [ʒ] but the actual pronunciation may vary. |
| Å Å Å represents various sounds in several languages. Å is part of the alphabets used for the Alemannic and the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German... , å |
ruotsalainen oo | /oː/, /ˈruot.sɑˌlɑi.nen oː/ | The "Swedish o", carried over from the Swedish alphabet Swedish alphabet Modern Swedish is written with a 29-letter Latin alphabet:Prior to the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista in 2006, the letters and were collated together.... and redundant in Finnish; retained especially for writing Finland-Swedish Finland-Swedish Finland Swedish is a general term for the closely related cluster of dialects of Swedish spoken in Finland by Swedish-speaking Finns as their mother tongue... proper names. Pronounced as [o]. No Finnish words contain a letter å. |
| Ä Ä "Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :... , ä |
ää | /æː/ | |
| Ö Ö "Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut... , ö |
öö | /øː/ | The precise pronunciation tends to be between [ø] and [œ]. |
The extra letters Ä and Ö
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
letters ä and ö (accompanied by the Swedish å, which is actually not needed for writing Finnish). In Finnish, these extra letters are collectively referred to as the ääkköset when they need to be distinguished from the 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 "Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
n characters" (however, the Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
and Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
variants æ
Æ
Æ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic...
and ø
Ø
Ø — minuscule: "ø", is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Southern Sami languages.It's mostly used as a representation of mid front rounded vowels, such as ø œ, except for Southern Sami where it's used as an [oe] diphtong.The name of this letter is the same as the sound...
are usually not taken into account).
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 suffices using these letters will use either the front or back form depending on the vowel harmony of the word they are affixed to. The glyph
Glyph
A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
s for ä and ö are derived from the similar looking German umlauted
Umlaut (diacritic)
The diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....
letters, but as with y versus u, they are considered letters in their own right and thus alphabetized separately (after z).
As Finnish is unrelated to Germanic languages, the Germanic umlaut
Germanic umlaut
In linguistics, umlaut is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined and is used principally in connection with the study of the Germanic languages...
or convention of considering digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
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 (e.g. haen "I seek" vs. hän "he, she"). If ä and ö are not available because of technical limitations, they are replaced by a and o.
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
Tilde
The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics....
. In practice, almost any diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
situated above the base glyph (for example, á ā ã) would probably be interpreted as a carelessly written pair of dots (ä). 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
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
s 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 k or s), q (which is usually replaced with k, and particularly qu with kv), and x (which is replaced with ks). In addition, the Swedish å is redundant from the Finnish point of view, as its pronunciation is more or less equivalent to the Finnish way of pronouncing o. 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. kahvi 'coffee', parta 'beard'. The letters include b, f, and g (which is also used to mark the inherent velar nasalVelar nasalThe velar nasal is the sound of ng in English sing. It is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N....
[ŋ], however). From a historical point of view, even d could be said to belong to this group, but the [d] sound has long been an established part of standard language.
- The letters w and z could be classified into both of the aforementioned groups. The [w] sound is not regarded as a phonemePhonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
in Finnish, but historically w was used to mark [v] (or, rather, [ʋ]), as in German or Polish. Although this is today considered archaic and v is used instead, w may still occur in some old surnames as a variant of v. Occasionally this can also be applied for faux-archaic effect, as in Wanha SatamaWanha SatamaWanha Satama is an exhibition centre in Helsinki, Finland.Wanha Satama is located in Katajanokka, a maritime district just east of the city centre. In Katajanokka, it is located very near the seaside and close to the Viking Line terminal. The Wanha Satama building is an old brick building...
"Ye Olde Harbour". Likewise, the [z] sound is not native to Finnish, but z (or tz) was formerly used to denote [ts] (as in German). It is still often pronounced [ts], but its pronunciation varies greatly: some speakers may pronounce it [s], or sometimes [tʃ].
- The letters š [ʃ] and ž [ʒ] (s and z with caronCaronA caron or háček , also known as a wedge, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical palatalization, iotation, or postalveolar pronunciation in the orthography of some Baltic, Slavic, Finno-Lappic, and other languages.It looks...
) are officially recommended instead of sh and zh for transliteration from another alphabet. For example, Russian Бре́жнев (transcribed Brezhnev in English) is transliterated Brežnev. However, these sounds are foreign to the Finnish language, the letters do not appear on Finnish keyboards and their pronunciation is not consistent. The [ʃ] sound is familiar to most Finnish speakers and quite commonly used in many loanwords, e.g. šakki 'chess', shampoo, but [ʒ] is restricted to foreign words only. In practice, official publications, dictionaries, encyclopedias and some formal registerRegister (sociolinguistics)In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting an English speaker may be more likely to adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal...
journals use these letters, otherwise sh and zh are used or the distinction is simply ignored.
Alphabetical order
In Finnish, words are ordered alphabetically according to the collationCollation
Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
rules specified in the official standard SFS 4600. There are a few cases where Finnish collation is different from the rules applied in English:
- åÅÅ represents various sounds in several languages. Å is part of the alphabets used for the Alemannic and the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German...
, äÄ"Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :...
and öÖ"Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut...
are regarded distinct letters and collated after zZZ is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal... - wWW is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V...
is generally regarded equivalent to vVV is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....
(in a multilingual context it may, however, be collated separately after v, as in English).
Diacritics
Diacritics
diacritics is a quarterly academic journal established in 1971 at Cornell University and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Articles serve to review recent literature in the field of literary criticism, and have covered topics in gender studies, political theory, psychoanalysis, queer...
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
Vilén
Vilén is a Finnish family name of Swedish origin:* Jari Vilén, Finnish Minister of Foreign Trade * Erik Vilén, silver-medalist at the 1924 Summer Olympics...
, if possible, but when arranging words alphabetically, diacritics are usually ignored (this also applies to š
Š
The grapheme Š, š is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with , but the lowercase š is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.For use in computer...
and ž
Ž
The grapheme Ž is formed from Latin Z with the addition of caron . It is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiced postalveolar fricative, a sound similar to English g in mirage, or Portuguese and French j...
, despite them being an officially recognized part of Finnish orthography). There are, however, some exceptions:
- GermanGerman languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
üÜÜ, or ü, is a character which can be either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter U with an umlaut or a diaeresis...
and HungarianHungarian languageHungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
űDouble acute accentThe double acute accent is a diacritic mark of the Latin script. It is used primarily in written Hungarian, and consequently is sometimes referred to as Hungarumlaut, a portmanteau of Hungarian umlaut...
are alphabetized as y, not as u - DanishDanish languageDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
and NorwegianNorwegian languageNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
øØØ — minuscule: "ø", is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Southern Sami languages.It's mostly used as a representation of mid front rounded vowels, such as ø œ, except for Southern Sami where it's used as an [oe] diphtong.The name of this letter is the same as the sound...
, EstonianEstonian languageEstonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...
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
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
or õ (nasal vowel
Nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. By contrast, oral vowels are ordinary vowels without this nasalisation...
) as used in Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, as these letters represent quite different orthographic
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
traditions.
Other special cases:
- SamiSami languagesSami or Saami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people in parts of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently and erroneously believed to be a single language. Several names are used for the Sami...
ŋ (eng) is alphabetized as nNN is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet... - Sami đ (d with stroke) and IcelandicIcelandic languageIcelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
ðÐA Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...
(eth) are alphabetized as dDD is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the... - Icelandic þ (thorn) is alphabetized as th
- PolishPolish languagePolish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
ł (l with stroke) is alphabetized as lLŁ or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet...
.
Ligatures are alphabetized as two individual letters:
- æÆÆ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic...
is alphabetized as ae (not as ä) - œŒŒ œŒ is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used to represent the Greek diphthong οι, a usage which continues in English and French...
is alphabetized as oe (not as ö) - ßßIn the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...
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.
Writing Finnish
The Finnish orthographyOrthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
strives to represent all morphemes phonologically
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
and, roughly speaking, the sound value
Finnish phonology
Unless otherwise noted, statements in this article refer to Standard Finnish, which is based on the dialect spoken in Häme Province in central south Finland. Standard Finnish is used by professional speakers, such as the reporters and the news presenters on television.-Vowels:Phonetically, the...
of each letter tends to correspond with its value in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) – although some discrepancies do exist. 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
Velar nasal
The velar nasal is the sound of ng in English sing. It is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N....
[ŋ], which does not have an allotted letter.
Short and long sounds
In Finnish, both vowelVowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s and consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
s may be either short or long
Length (phonetics)
In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that are distinctively longer than other sounds. There are long vowels as well as long consonants .Many languages do not have distinctive length...
. A short sound is written with a single letter, and a long sound is written with a double letter (digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
). It is necessary to recognize the difference between such words as tuli /ˈtu.li/ 'fire', tuuli /ˈtuː.li/ 'wind' and tulli /ˈtul.li/ 'customs'
In syllabification
Syllabification
Syllabification is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken or written.It is also used to describe the process of something like a consonant turning into a syllable, but this is not discussed here...
, a long consonant is always regarded as having a syllable break in the middle (as in /ˈtɑp.pɑː/), but a long vowel (or a diphthong
Diphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the 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
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
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.
In pronunciation, a long vowel is regarded as a single phoneme, but when written as a digraph, it is collated
Collation
Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
as formed of two individual letters.
Velar nasal
The velar nasalVelar nasal
The velar nasal is the sound of ng in English sing. It is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N....
/ŋ/ (generally referred to as äng-äänne 'the eng sound') does not have a letter of its own. Natively, a short /ŋ/ only occurs before /k/, and it is simply written with n, as in kenkä /ˈkeŋ.kæ/ 'shoe'. Since the alveolar nasal
Alveolar nasal
The alveolar nasal is a type of consonantal sound used in numerous spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar nasals is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is n....
/n/ can not occur in such a position, /ŋ/ can be seen as an allophone
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
of /n/. However, if the /k/ is weakened (because of a phenomenon called consonant gradation
Consonant gradation
Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation, in which consonants alternate between various "grades". It is found in some Uralic languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Northern Sámi, and the Samoyed language Nganasan. In addition, it has been reconstructed for Proto-Germanic, the parent...
that occurs when the word is inflected), the result is a long, or geminated, velar nasal /ŋː/ that is written with digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
ng, as in kengät /ˈkeŋ.ŋæt/ 'shoes'. The geminated /ŋː/ is not an allophone of geminated /nː/, since minimal pair
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
s do exist: kangas /ˈkɑŋ.ŋɑs/ 'textile
Textile
A textile or cloth is a flexible woven material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibres often referred to as thread or yarn. Yarn is produced by spinning raw fibres of wool, flax, cotton, or other material to produce long strands...
' vs. kannas /ˈkɑn.nɑs/ 'isthmus
Isthmus
An isthmus is a narrow strip of land connecting two larger land areas usually with waterforms on either side.Canals are often built through isthmuses where they may be particularly advantageous to create a shortcut for marine transportation...
'.
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 /ˈeŋ.lɑn.ti/ (with a short /ŋ/ but no /ɡ/), and even magneetti 'magnet
Magnet
A magnet is a material or object that produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field is invisible but is responsible for the most notable property of a magnet: a force that pulls on other ferromagnetic materials, such as iron, and attracts or repels other magnets.A permanent magnet is an object...
' is pronounced /ˈmɑŋ.neːt.ti/ (with plain g being pronounced as /ŋ/ when followed by n) – cf. a more specialized term diagnoosi /di.aɡ.noː.si/ 'diagnosis
Diagnosis
Diagnosis is the identification of the nature and cause of anything. Diagnosis is used in many different disciplines with variations in the use of logics, analytics, and experience to determine the cause and effect relationships...
', and in a word-initial position gnuu /ɡnuː/ 'gnu
Wildebeest
The wildebeest , also called the gnu is an antelope of the genus Connochaetes. It is a hooved mammal...
'. Following the typical Finnish pronunciation pattern, kongestio 'congestion
Congestion
Congestion generally means excessive crowding.Congestion may refer to:* congestion in heart failure, a term to describe low cardiac output seen in heart failure.* Nasal congestion, the blockage of nasal passages due to swollen membranes...
' is often pronounced /ˈkoŋ.ŋes.ti.o/, but /ˈkoŋ.ɡes.ti.o/ may also occur.
Voiced plosives
Traditionally, /b/ and /ɡ/ 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 often ridiculed in the media, e.g. if a news reporter or a high official consistently and publicly pronounces Belgia 'Belgium' as /ˈpel.ki.a/. Even many educated speakers, however, still make no distinction between voiced and voiceless plosives in regular speech, although minimal pairs exist: /ˈbus.si/ 'busBus
A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses; coaches are...
' vs. /ˈpus.si/ 'bag', /ˈɡo.ril.lɑ/ 'gorilla
Gorilla
Gorillas are the largest extant species of primates. They are ground-dwelling, predominantly herbivorous apes that inhabit the forests of central Africa. Gorillas are divided into two species and either four or five subspecies...
' vs. /ˈko.ril.lɑ/ 'with/at a basket
Basket
A basket is a container which is traditionally constructed from stiff fibres, which can be made from a range of materials, including wood splints, runners, and cane. While most baskets are made from plant materials, other materials such as horsehair, baleen, or metal wire can be used. Baskets are...
'.
The status of /d/ is somewhat different from /b/ and /ɡ/, since it appears in native Finnish words, too, as a regular "weak" correspondence of the voiceless /t/ (as a result of consonant gradation
Consonant gradation
Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation, in which consonants alternate between various "grades". It is found in some Uralic languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Northern Sámi, and the Samoyed language Nganasan. In addition, it has been reconstructed for Proto-Germanic, the parent...
), and even in the infinitives of many verbs, such as "syödä," "to eat." At the time when Mikael Agricola
Mikael Agricola
Mikael Agricola was a clergyman who became the de facto founder of written Finnish and a prominent proponent of the Protestant Reformation in Sweden . He is often called the "father of the Finnish written language". Agricola was consecrated as the bishop of Turku in 1554, without papal approval...
, the "father" of literary Finnish, devised a system for writing the language, this sound still had the value of the voiced dental fricative /ð/, as in English then. Since neither Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
nor German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
of that time had a separate sign for this sound, Agricola chose to mark it with d or dh.
Later on, the */ð/ sound developed in a variety of ways in different Finnish dialects: it was deleted, or became a hiatus
Hiatus (linguistics)
In phonology, hiatus or diaeresis refers to two vowel sounds occurring in adjacent syllables, with no intervening consonant. When two adjacent vowel sounds occur in the same syllable, the result is instead described as a diphthong....
, a flap consonant
Flap consonant
In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another.-Contrast with stops and trills:...
, or any of t, r, l, j, jj, th. For example, of your (pl.) water could be:
- teiän veen
- tei'än ve'en
- teiä vede
- teirän veren
- teilän velen
- teijjän vejen
- teidän veden
- teitän veten
- teiðän veðen
- teidhän vethen
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 */ð/ 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 [d], 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
Deodorant
Deodorants are substances applied to the body to affect body odor caused by bacterial growth and the smell associated with bacterial breakdown of perspiration in armpits, feet and other areas of the body. A subgroup of deodorants, antiperspirants, affect odor as well as prevent sweating by...
' pronounced as /teotorantti/, while native Finnish words with a /d/ 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 [d] 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 [d] can now be heard in all parts of the country, at least in loanwords and in formal speech. Nowadays replacing /d/ with a /t/ is considered rustic, for example /nyt tarvittais uutta tirektiiviä/ instead of /nyt tarvittaisiin uutta direktiiviä/ 'now we could use a new directive'.
Väinö Linna
Väinö Linna
Väinö Linna was one of the most influential Finnish authors of the 20th century. He shot to immediate literary fame with his third novel, Tuntematon sotilas , and consolidated his position with the trilogy Täällä Pohjantähden alla Väinö Linna (20 December 1920 – 21 April 1992) was one of the...
uses d as a hallmark of unpleasant command language in the novel The Unknown Soldier
The Unknown Soldier (novel)
The Unknown Soldier is author Väinö Linna's first major novel and his other major work besides Under the North Star. Published in 1954, it is a story about the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union as told from the viewpoint of ordinary Finnish soldiers...
. 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) d raised no irritation, as he spoke Helsinki slang
Helsinki slang
Helsinki slang or stadin slangi is a local dialect and a sociolect of the Finnish language mainly used in the capital Helsinki...
as his everyday speech.
In Helsinki slang
Helsinki slang
Helsinki slang or stadin slangi is a local dialect and a sociolect of the Finnish language mainly used in the capital Helsinki...
, 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. /dallas/ 's/he walked' (← native verb root talla-), /bonjata/ 'to understand' (← Russian /ponʲiˈmatʲ/ понимать). In the Southwestern dialects of Rauma-Eurajoki-Laitila area, /b/, /d/ and /ɡ/ are commonplace, since the voicing of nasals spread to phonemes /p/, /t/ and /k/, making them half-voiced, e.g. /sendä/ ← sentään or /ninɡo/ ← niin kuin. They are also found in those coastal areas where Swedish influenced the speech.
External links
- Omniglot: writing systems and languages of the world: Finnish
- Letters in Finnish
- Finnish pronunciation (compared to English, IPA available)