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Suomen kieli Finnish
Family	Sub-family	Language of	Script
Finno-Ugric	Baltic-Finnic	Finland European Union Minority In: Sweden	Extended Latin

Contents 1 Consonants 1.1 Gemination 2 Consonant Gradation 2.1 Simplification of Geminates 2.2 Lone /p t k/ 2.3 Following a Sonorant 3 Vowels 3.1 Vowel Harmony 3.2 Hear the language

Consonants

	Labial	Dental	Aleveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m	n			ŋ¹
Plosive	p (b³)	t d			k (g³)	ʔ²
Fricative	(f³)		s	(ʃ ʒ³)		h
Approximate	ʋ		l	j
Trill			r

¹ /ŋ/ as a phoneme is treated a bit oddly in the Finnish language, it will be expounded upon in the gemination section. ² The glottal stop exists allophonically in between words, however it is never represented in the text. ³ These phonemes aren't part of Finnish's native phonology, and aside from /f/ (which occurs in some dialects) are not reliably distinguished by most Finnish speakers. They exist mostly in loan words that have not been "nativized" yet.

Gemination

In standard Finnish, every consonant can be geminated, or made long, except for /ʋ/ and /j/, however dialectally one may encounter them, and genitive /h/ is very uncommon (though not unheard of). When writing, most phonemes are geminated by doubling them, however /ŋ/ is a special case. Ungeminated, it would be /ŋ/ <nk>, however when geminating it, it becomes /ŋ:/ <ng>.

Consonant Gradation

Only the stops /p t k/ can undergo gradation, therefore in many learning materials, they're called "k t p changes." For the extent of this article, they will be divided into three main groupings. First, simplification of geminates, second, lone /p t k/ and then following a sonorant.

Simplification of Geminates

This type of gradation is just like it sounds, it's taking a geminate stop and leniting it.

Strong	Weak
pp	p
tt	t
kk	k

Lone /p t k/

This sort of gradation happens to /p t k/ when they're all by their lonesome.

Strong	Weak
p	v
t	d
k	<->¹

¹ /k/ is a letter that goes a bit wonky when it's effected by consonant gradation. Typically when it's just a lone /k/, it will become /ʔ/, however when the /k/ falls between two /u/ or /y/, it will become /v/. Therefore: /uku/ > /uvu/ and /yky/ > /yvy/

Following a Sonorant

A sonorant is any sound that doesn't restrict or stop airflow through the mouth. Certain sonorants in conjunction with /p t k/ cause consonant gradation.

Strong	Weak
mp	mm
nt	nn
lt	ll>
rt	rr
nk	ng
lki	lje
rki	rje

Vowels

	Front rounded	Front Unrounded	Back
Close	y y:	i i:	u u:
Mid	ø ø:	e e:	o o:
Open		æ æ:	ɑ ɑ:

Vowel Harmony

Vowel harmony is a patter (common in many finno-ugric languages) which restricts the distribution of vowels within a word. This means that each word can only have vowels from one group (the groupings displayed below). This also comes into play when choosing a suffix when declining the word.

Each open vowel has a closed counterpart, so if the word is open, you choose the open one, if the word is closed, you choose the closed one. This needs to be checked

Front	neutral	Back
y	i	u
ö	e	o
ä		a

These letters correspond to pronunciations of the table above except for ä which, although unrounded, is a front vowel in Finnish. Long vowels are written by doubling the vowel letter.

As you can see, there are three back vowels and three front vowels. words in Finnish will rarely contain both back and front vowels. In order to keep the words this way, suffixes in finnish containing an a, o, or u, will have an equivalent form containing an ä, ö, or y. Consequently, the ending placed on a word must have the same type of vowel as the word itself.

Although /e/ and /i/ are technically front vowels, they don't affect the vowel harmony of a word nor are they affected by it (i.e. a suffix with e or i can be added to a back-vowel word or a front-vowel word). As such they are called neutral vowels.

Words containing only the vowels /e/ and /i/ must be suffixed by the front-vowel counterpart. E.g. kieli > kielellä, not kielella.

In short: - words containing front vowels use front vowel suffixes. - words containing back vowels use back vowel suffixes. - words containing only neutral vowels use front vowel suffixes. - neutral vowels do not affect vowel harmony.

Hear the language

Pocahontas - Colors of The Wind (Finnish+subtitles)

Finnish pages
Introduction · Adjectives · Cases · Lexicon · Negative Verb · Numbers · Pronouns · Sounds and Writing · Suffixes · Verbs

Finno-Ugric Languages
Baltic-Finnic	Estonian · Finnish · Ingrian · Karelian · Livonian · Veps · Votic · Võro
Permic	Komi · Udmurt
Ugric	Hungarian · Khanty · Mansi
N/A	Erzya · Mari · Moksha