【芬兰语语法】§95 GENERAL

 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.