This page details the pronunciation of Standard Finnish (Standard Spoken Finnish,yleispuhekieli), which is, unless otherwise specified, the spoken variety used to document Finnish pronunciations on the English Wiktionary. It is the standard prestige variety used in e.g. formal discussions, newscasts and official speeches, and is the primary variety taught in schools.
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All consonants except/j/ and/ʋ/ may appear geminated. Geminated/h/ is however very rare.
Standard Finnish native plosives are unvoiced and unaspirated:/k/,/p/,/t/.
An additional 'native'/d/ can be found as the weak grade of/t/ (underconsonant gradation), and thus only occurs between vowels, either independently or as part of/hd/ (thus, native/d/ is never geminated). This originates as a spelling pronunciation by Swedish speakers learning Finnish during the 19th century, as it was spelled⟨d⟩ (earlier also⟨dh⟩) in an attempt to represent/ð/, its pronunciation in the Southwest Finnish literary standard at the time. In other dialects, it may be realized as[r],[l], or lost, only leaving behind e.g. a glide. Even in Standard Finnish, the consonant may in rapid speech become analveolar tap.
Recent borrowings can also contain the phonemes/b/,/d/ and/ɡ/, which are pronounced as voiced plosives, although in monolingual Finnish speech they may only be partially voiced, if at all. However,minimal pairs do exist.
For (potential) glottal stops, seefinal gemination below.
Native words only have two fricatives:/s/ and/h/. The pronunciation of/s/ is highly variable. It is often devoiced and somewhat retracted, but may be voiced between two vowels in fast speech, and may even become a/ʃ/ "sh-sound" after rounded vowels.
Two more fricatives can be found in loanwords:/f/ and/ʃ/⟨š⟩. The latter is often pronounced as if it were/s/ if there is no risk of confusion.
Finnish⟨v⟩ is not a fricative.
The single Finnish rhotic/r/ is arolled R, but if ungeminated, may be realized as a tap between two vowels in rapid speech.
Finnish/l/ is always a bright L, never a dark (velarized) L.
Finnish has three nasals:/m/,/n/ and/ŋ/. While the first two are common and can appear in any position,/ŋ/ in native words is only found either as part of/ŋk/⟨nk⟩ or/ŋː/⟨ng⟩ between two vowels. In loanwords, it may appear as a short/ŋ/ even before other consonants or at the end of a word.
/j/ and/ʋ/ are approximants in Finnish. The latter is spelled⟨v⟩, but is not a fricative.
All vowels may appear short or long, and there is very little if any difference in quality between the short and long variants of the same vowel.
⟨a⟩ is/ɑ/, a decidedly back vowel.⟨y⟩,⟨ä⟩ and⟨ö⟩ are/y/,/æ/ and/ø/ respectively, all front vowels. Finnish/e/,/o/ and/ø/ are mid vowels.
Standard Finnish has 18 diphthongs, which are listed in the tables above.
Some Finnish words or word roots featurefinal gemination (also calledboundary gemination orboundary lengthening, Finnish:rajakahdennus), which is usually marked with/ˣ/ (Finnish:jäännöslopuke; see alsothe entry for this symbol). This feature (argued to bemorphophonetic) originates from the loss of some final consonants (primarily⟨-k⟩ or⟨-h⟩) always follows a vowel, and its realization depends on what follows it:
This feature is not indicated in the Finnish orthography, but results inminimal pairs (albeit marginal). Final gemination usually also affects clitics, which means it can in some cases even surface within a word, such asjonnekin/ˈjonːeˣkin/ →/ˈjonːekːin/ (respelled⟨jonnekkin⟩). Possessive suffixes are however not affected. There are also some cases in which final gemination has in effect become grammaticalized, such as the partitive singular ofhame →hametta, in which the geminated consonant is spelled with gemination.
For some speakers, final gemination may be missing within words, such as within compounds or before clitics; this is more common in rapid speech.
In standard Finnish, final gemination occurs primarily in the following cases:
The following features may or may not have final gemination depending on the idiolect (speaker and variety):
Furthermore, in some dialects, final gemination is completely absent.
Stress occurs on the first syllable of any given word. In compounds, secondary stress occurs at the beginning of each component word, which may result in stress falling on consecutive syllables if a component is only a single syllable. Certain other words have phonemic secondary stress as well.
Rhythmic secondary stress, generally taken as weaker than the phonemic secondary stress found in compound words (or some other words), as described above, has been interpreted in different ways. Such stress is not strictly phonemic and can depend on the speaker and context. Songs and poems, in particular, may take significant liberties.
According to the traditional explanation, rhythmic stress also occurs roughly on odd syllables and is assigned left-to-right, with the leftmost syllable in a prosodic foot being stressed, but may skip up to two light syllables if a heavy syllable follows (e.g.⟨omenanamme⟩ →o.me.na.nam.me). Some suffixes may also incur secondary stress automatically, in which case they may 'steal' it from an immediately preceding syllable. Syllables containing (the start of) certain inflectional suffixes, including possessive suffixes, may also avoid secondary stress, by e.g. shifting it to the preceding syllable, even if it is a light syllable.
An alternative explanation, offered by Karvonen (2005; see Further reading), instead posits that rhythmic stress is predominantly assigned right-to-left, which results in different stresses for words with more than four syllables (e.g.kolesteroli in the traditional explanation isko.les.te.ro.li, but when assigned right to left, is insteadko.les.te.ro.li). In addition, vowel hiatuses are avoided when assigning stresses (televisio iste.le.vi.si.o, not xte.le.vi.si.o), and syllables may instead stress shift back by one if that syllable has higher priority (is heavy, or contains a long vowel/diphthong).
Final syllables (in words with more than one) are usually not stressed, but if the final syllable is heavy (ends in a consonant or contains a long vowel or diphthong) and the preceding syllable is light (ends in a short vowel) and unstressed, the final syllable may receive stress (e.g.taistelevan becomestais.te.le.van instead oftais.te.le.van). As can be seen in the example, this may and will cause stress in earlier syllables to shift forwards.
Finnish is rich insandhi phenomena. Besides the final gemination listed above, there are instances of assimilation:/nk/ is generally realized as if it were[ŋk] and/np/ as[mp].
Certain highly marginal phonemes are not listed on the table above, since they are only found in a small set of recentunadapted loanwords, and they are not distinguished by all speakers. In general, they are more likely to be used by learned and/or multilingual speakers, while monolingual speakers effectively never use them. This is not a guarantee, however; there are educated, multilingual speakers who do not use them.
