This book has so far been primarily concerned with the grammar of standard
Finnish, which is predominantly a written form of the language. However,
few Finns actually keep strictly to this norm in their speech; it is mostly heard
in official, more or less ‘solemn’ situations in which most Finns rarely, if
ever, find themselves (speeches, sermons, radio and TV newsreading, rituals
such as the opening of Parliament, often in teaching, etc.).
The norms or rules of this spoken standard language are very close to
those of the written language. One often hears the claim that ‘Finnish is
spoken the same way as it is written’. But this is not literally true. The claim
refers to the correspondence between letters and phonemes (§5): one and the
same phoneme regularly corresponds to each letter, and vice versa.
In everyday situations not many Finns express themselves in speech
exactly as they would in writing. The grammar of colloquial spoken Finnish
differs in many ways from that of the written standard and the official spoken
form based on this, both in pronunciation and in morphology and syntax.
It is not therefore in any way ‘bad Finnish’; it is merely a form of the
language used in different situations. In the same way, there have long existed
regional dialects which also differ from the (written or spoken) standard
language, e.g. the south-western dialects, the Häme dialects, the south-eastern
dialects and the northern dialects.
During the past few decades, however, spoken Finnish has been going
through a critical transition period caused by rapid changes in society. The
most important of these changes have been: the postwar resettlements;
changes in the structure of the economy, followed by migration from the
countryside and urbanization (particularly the rise of Greater Helsinki); the
influence of a uniform, increasingly longer and more thorough education,
narrowing not only class differences but also language differences; the
nationwide influence of radio and TV; and the linguistically unifying effect of
popular light literature.
The colloquial spoken language 245
The birth of Greater Helsinki, the Helsinki-based broadcasting media and
the status of the capital city have given rise to a widespread form of free
spoken Finnish. Many of the features of this spoken language are
nevertheless of older stock, originating e.g. in the western dialects of the
province of Uusimaa.
Typical of this colloquial speech are certain omissions and assimilations
of sounds (§96) and a number of morphological and syntactic features (§97)
which are extremely common, especially in the speech of the younger
generation.
