Language Information

Finnish alphabet and pronunciation

Characteristic features of Finnish are vowel harmony and an agglutinative morphology; due to the extensive use of the latter, words can be quite long.

• The main stress is always on the first syllable.
• There are eight vowels, whose lexical and grammatical role is highly important. The vowels a, o, u have front counterparts ä, ö, y in the vowel harmony, where i and e are neutral.
• Almost all consonants are either alveolar or pronounced such that the tongue doesn't have to move away from the alveolar ridge.
• Long vowels and consonants are represented by double occurrences of the relevant graphemes. This causes no confusion, and permits these sounds to be written without having to nearly double the size of the alphabet to accommodate separate graphemes for long sounds.
• Some consonants (v, j, d) and all consonants occurring in (always medial) clusters do not have distinctive length, and consequently, their allophonic variation is not indicated in spelling.

Finnish orthography is morphemic, and the morphemic notation is built upon the phonetic principle: with just a few subtle exceptions, within a single morpheme, each phoneme (distinct sound) of the language is represented by exactly one grapheme (independent letter), and each grapheme represents exactly one phoneme, if the morpheme is pronounced in isolation.

Grammar

Unlike in English, the personal pronouns are used to refer to human beings only.

Verbs gain personal suffixes for each person; these suffixes are grammatically more important than pronouns, which may be dropped.

In common with some other languages, the second person plural can be used as a polite form when addressing one person. The Finnish language does not distinguish gender in nouns or even in personal pronouns: 'hän' = 'he' or 'she' depending on the referent.

Nouns may be suffixed with the markers for a case. Pronouns gain suffixes just as other nouns. Finnish has fifteen noun cases: four grammatical cases, six locative cases, two essive cases (three in some Eastern dialects) and three marginal cases.

Finnish cases
Case	Suffix	English preposition
Grammatical
nominatiivi
genetiivi	-n	of
akkusatiivi	- or -n
partitiivi	-(t)a
Locative (internal)
inessiivi	-ssa	in
elatiivi	-sta	from (inside)
illatiivi	-an, -en, etc.	into
Locative (external)
adessiivi	-lla	at, on
ablatiivi	-lta	from
allatiivi	-lle	to
Essive
essiivi	-na	as
(eksessiivi; dialectal)	-nta	from being
translatiivi	-ksi	to (role of)
Marginal
instruktiivi	-n	with (the aid of)
abessiivi	-tta	without
komitatiivi	-ne-	together (with)

Finnish verbs have present, imperfect, perfect and pluperfect tenses.

• Present corresponds to English present and future tenses.
• Imperfect corresponds to English past continuous and past simple, indicating a past action which is complete but might have been a point event, a temporally extended event, or a repeated event.
• Perfect corresponds to the English present perfect in most of its usages, but can carry more sense than in English of a past action with present effects.
• Pluperfect corresponds to the English past perfect in its usage.

Finnish has two possible verb voices: active and passive. The active voice corresponds with that of English, but the passive voice has some important differences. Since Finnish is an inflected language, word order within sentences can be comparatively free - the function of a word being indicated by its ending. The most usual neutral order, however, is subject-verb-object.

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