【芬兰语语法】§5 LETTERS AND SOUNDS

 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.