Disregarding words of foreign origin, Finnish has eight letters for vowels and
13 for consonants: i e ä y ö u o a and p t k d g s h v j l r m n. With few
exceptions the following important correspondence holds between letters and
phonemes in carefully pronounced Standard Finnish (phonemes are sounds
thought of as types, irrespective of slight variations in the speech of the same
person or between different people).
Note the following pronunciation details:
• The vowel corresponding to the letter ä is an open unrounded front vowel
(cf. the short vowels in British English ‘shall, rat’, and the long vowel in
Swedish bär ‘berry’).
• The vowel corresponding to the letter y is a close rounded front vowel (cf.
German Führer).
• The vowel corresponding to the letter ö is a half-close rounded front
vowel (cf. German Göring).
• The combination of letters ng is pronounced as a long [??] sound as in
rengas ‘ring’ [re??as].
• The letter n before a k is pronounced as a fairly long [?] sound as in
Helsinki [helsi?ki] (cf. English ‘drink’).
Each letter corresponds to one and the same phoneme, and each
phoneme corresponds to one and the same letter.
10 Finnish: An Essential Grammar
• When length is used to differentiate meanings, short phonemes are written
with one letter and long phonemes with two, as in tuli ‘fire’—tuuli
‘wind’—tulli ‘customs’; kansa ‘people’—kanssa ‘with’; muta ‘mud’
(nominative case)—mutaa ‘mud’ (partitive case).
• Words of foreign origin may contain other letters than those mentioned
above, for example b c f w x z. Names of Swedish origin may contain the
letter å (Å) as in Åbo, Åke, Svartå.
• The alphabetical order of letters is a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u
v w x y z å ä ö.
• The pronunciation of the everyday spoken language differs in several
respects from that of the standard spoken norm (see Chapter 22). The
strict correspondence between letters and phonemes does not hold in
everyday spoken language.
