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Finnish (endonym: suomi or suomen kieli ) is a Finnic languages of the Uralic languages language family, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland, alongside Swedish language. In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish) are official minority languages. Kven language, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norway counties of Troms and Finnmark by a minority of Finnish descent.
Finnish is typologically agglutinative and uses almost exclusively Suffix. , , , numerals and are inflection depending on their role in the sentence. Sentences are normally formed with subject–verb–object word order, although the extensive use of inflection allows them to be ordered differently. Word order variations are often reserved for differences in information structure. Finnish orthography uses a Latin-script alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, and is phonemic to a great extent. Vowel length and gemination are distinguished, and there are a range of diphthongs, although vowel harmony limits which diphthongs are possible.
Finnish demonstrates an affiliation with other Uralic languages (such as Hungarian and Sami languages) in several respects including:
Several theories exist as to the geographic origin of Finnish and the other Uralic languages. The most widely held view is that they originated as a Proto-Uralic language somewhere in the boreal forest belt around the Ural Mountains region and/or the bend of the middle Volga. The strong case for Proto-Uralic is supported by common vocabulary with regularities in sound correspondences, as well as by the fact that the Uralic languages have many similarities in structure and grammar. Despite having overlapping geographical distributions, Finnic languages and Sami languages are not closely related, and the hypothesis of a separate taxonomic "Finno-Samic" node is controversial.
The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, United States, classifies Finnish as a level III language (of four levels) in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers.
No language census exists for Norway, neither for Kven, standard Finnish, or combined. As of 2023, 7,454 first- or second-generation immigrants from Finland were registered as having Norwegian residency, while as of 2021, 235 Finns were registered as foreigners studying at Norwegian higher education. Great Norwegian Encyclopedia estimates Kven speakers at 2,000-8,000. Altogether, this results in a total amount of Finnish-speakers roughly between 7,200 and 15,600.
In the latest census, around 1000 people in Russia claimed to speak Finnish natively; however, a larger amount of 14,000 claimed to be able to speak Finnish in total.
There are also forms of Finnish spoken by diasporas outside Europe, such as American Finnish, spoken by Finnish Americans, and Siberian Finnish, spoken by Siberian Finns.
Finnish also enjoys the status of an official minority language in Sweden. Under the Nordic Language Convention, citizens of the Nordic countries speaking Finnish have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable to any interpretation or translation costs. However, concerns have been expressed about the future status of Finnish in Sweden, for example, where reports produced for the Swedish government during 2017 show that minority language policies are not being respected, particularly for the 7% of Finns settled in the country.
Current models assume that three or more Proto-Finnic dialects evolved during the first millennium BCE. These dialects were defined geographically, and were distinguished from one another along a north–south split as well as an east–west split. The northern dialects of Proto-Finnic, from which Finnish developed, lacked the mid vowel . This vowel was found only in the southern dialects, which developed into Estonian, Livonian, and Votic language. The northern variants used third person singular pronoun hän instead of southern tämä (Est. tema). While the eastern dialects of Proto-Finnic (which developed in the modern-day eastern Finnish dialects, Veps, Karelian, and Ingrian) formed genitive plural nouns via plural stems (e.g., eastern Finnish kalojen < * kaloi-ten), the western dialects of Proto-Finnic (today's Estonian, Livonian and western Finnish varieties) used the non-plural stems (e.g., Est. kalade < * kala-ten). Another defining characteristic of the east–west split was the use of the Reflexive verb suffix -(t)te, used only in the eastern dialects.
During the Middle Ages, when Finland was under Swedish rule, Finnish was only spoken language. At the time, the language of Hanseatic League was Middle Low German, the language of administration Swedish language, and religious ceremonies were held in Latin. This meant that Finnish speakers could use their mother tongue only in everyday life. Finnish was considered inferior to Swedish, and Finnish speakers were second-class members of society because they could not use their language in any official situations. There were even efforts to reduce the use of Finnish through parish clerk schools, the use of Swedish in church, and by having Swedish-speaking servants and maids move to Finnish-speaking areas.
Though Agricola's intention was that each phoneme (and allophone under qualitative consonant gradation) should correspond to one letter, he failed to achieve this goal in various respects. For example, k, c, and q were all used for the phoneme . Likewise, he alternated between dh and d to represent the allophonic (like th in English this), between dh and z to represent (like th in thin, but longer in duration), and between gh and g to represent the allophonic . Agricola did not consistently represent vowel length in his orthography.
Others revised Agricola's work later, striving for a more systematic writing system. Along the way, Finnish lost several fricative consonants in a process of sound change. The sounds and disappeared from the language, surviving only in a small rural region in Western Finland. In the standard language, however, the effect of the lost sounds is thus:
Modern Finnish punctuation, along with that of Swedish, uses the colon (:) to separate the stem of a word and its grammatical ending in some cases, for example after , as in EU:ssa 'in the EU'. (This contrasts with some other alphabetic writing systems, which would use other symbols, such as e.g. apostrophe, hyphen.) Since suffixes play a prominent role in the language, this use of the colon is quite common.
In 1853 Daniel Europaeus published the first Swedish-Finnish dictionary, and between 1866 and 1880 Elias Lönnrot compiled the first Finnish-Swedish dictionary. In the same period, Antero Warelius conducted ethnographic research and, among other topics, he documented the geographic distribution of the Finnish dialects.
The most important contributions to improving the status of Finnish were made by Elias Lönnrot. His impact on the development of modern vocabulary in Finnish was particularly significant. In addition to compiling the Kalevala, he acted as an arbiter in disputes about the development of standard Finnish between the proponents of western and eastern dialects, ensuring that the western dialects preferred by Agricola retained their preeminent role, while many originally dialect words from Eastern Finland were introduced to the standard language, thus enriching it considerably. (1985). 9789517173803, SKS, Finnish Literature Society. ISBN 9789517173803 The first novel written in Finnish (and by a Finnish speaker) was Seven Brothers (Seitsemän veljestä), published by Aleksis Kivi in 1870.
One form of speech related to Northern dialects, Meänkieli, which is spoken on the Swedish side of the border is recognized in Sweden as its own distinct language, having its own standardized language separate from Finnish. This form of speech developed from the border created between Sweden and Finland in 1809 when the Russian Empire annexed Finland. This caused the speakers of Meänkieli to be isolated from the developments of standard Finnish and instead be influenced by the Swedish language. However, it is still mutually intelligible with Finnish, and is thus sometimes considered a dialect of the Finnish language.
The Kven language is spoken in Finnmark and Troms, in Norway. Its speakers are descendants of Finnish emigrants to the region in the 18th and 19th centuries. Kven language is an official minority language in Norway.
Palatalization, a common feature of Uralic languages, had been lost in the Finnic branch, but it has been reacquired by most of these languages, including Eastern Finnish, but not Western Finnish. In Finnish orthography, this is denoted with a "j", e.g. vesj "water", cf. standard vesi .
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The literary language certainly still exerts a considerable influence upon the spoken word, because illiteracy is nonexistent and many Finns are avid readers. In fact, it is still not entirely uncommon to meet people who "talk book-ish" (puhuvat kirjakieltä); it may have connotations of pedantry, exaggeration, moderation, weaseling or sarcasm (somewhat like heavy use of Latinate words in English, or more old-fashioned or "pedantic" constructions: compare the difference between saying "There's no children I'll leave it to" and "There are no children to whom I shall leave it"). More common is the intrusion of typically literary constructions into a colloquial discourse, as a kind of quote from written Finnish. It is quite common to hear book-like and polished speech on radio or TV, and the constant exposure to such language tends to lead to the adoption of such constructions even in everyday language.
A prominent example of the effect of the standard language is the development of the consonant gradation form as in metsä : metsän, as this pattern was originally (1940) found natively only in the dialects of the southern Karelian isthmus and Ingria. It has been reinforced by the spelling "ts" for the dental fricative , used earlier in some western dialects. The spelling and the pronunciation this encourages however approximate the original pronunciation, still reflected in e.g. Karelian (meččä : mečän). In the spoken language, a fusion of Western (mettä : mettän) and Eastern (mehtä : metän) has resulted in (mettä : metän). Neither of these forms are identifiable as, or originate from, a specific dialect.
The orthography of informal language follows that of the formal. However, in signalling the former in writing, syncope and sandhi – especially internal – may occasionally amongst other characteristics be transcribed, e.g. menenpä → me(n)empä. This never occurs in the standard variety.
| formal language | colloquial language | meaning ! notes | |
| hän menee he menevät | se menee ne menee | "he/she goes"
"they go"loss of an animacy contrast in pronouns (ne and se are inanimate in the formal language), and
loss of a number contrast on verbs in the 3rd person (menee is 3rd person singular in the formal language) | |
| minä, minun, ... | mä(ä)/mie, mun/miun, ... | "I, my, ..." | various alternative, usually shorter, forms of 1st and 2nd person pronouns |
| (minä) tulen (minä) olen | mä tuun mä oon | "I'm coming" or "I will come" "I am" or "I will be"elision of before short vowels in certain Type III verbs along with vowel assimilation, and no pro-drop (i.e., personal pronouns are usually mandatory in the colloquial language) | |
| onko teillä eikö teillä ole | o(n)ks teil(lä) e(i)ks teil(lä) oo | "do you (pl.) have?" "don't you (pl.) have (it)?"vowel apocope and common use of the clitic -s in interrogatives (compare eiks to standard Estonian confirmatory interrogative eks) | |
| (me) emme sano | me ei sanota | "we don't say" or "we won't say"the passive voice is used in place of the first person plural | |
| (minun) kirjani | mun kirja | "my book"lack of possessive clitics on nouns | |
| (minä) en tiedä syödä | mä en ti(i)ä syyä | "I don't know" "to eat"elision of between vowels, and subsequent vowel assimilation (compare mä en ti(i)ä to standard Estonian ma ei tea or dialectal forms ma ei tia or ma ei tie) | |
| kuusikymmentäviisi | kuuskyt(ä)viis | "sixty-five"abbreviated forms of numerals | |
| punainen ajoittaa | punane(n) ajottaa | "red" "to time"unstressed diphthongs ending in become short vowels, and apocope of phrase-final -n | |
| korjannee | kai korjaa | "probably will fix"absence of the potential mood, use of kai 'probably' instead |
There are noticeable differences between dialects. Here the formal language does not mean a language spoken in formal occasions but the standard language which exists practically only in written form.
The quality of long vowels mostly overlaps with the quality of short vowels, with the exception of u, which is centralized with respect to uu; long vowels do not morph into . There are eighteen diphthongs; like vowels, diphthongs do not have significant allophony.
Almost all consonants have phonemic short and long () forms, although length is only contrastive in medial positions. Homosyllabic consonant clusters are mostly absent from native Finnish words, except for a small set of two-consonant sequences in , e.g. in karsta. However, as many recently adopted loanwords contain clusters, e.g. strutsi from Swedish struts, ('ostrich'), they have been integrated to the modern language in varying degrees.
Finnish is somewhat divergent from other Uralic languages in two respects: it has lost most of its fricatives and lost the distinction between palatalized and non-palatalized consonants. Finnish has only two fricatives in native words, and . All other fricatives are recognized as foreign, of which Finnish speakers can usually reliably distinguish and . The alphabet includes , usually realized as the affricate , as in German.
While standard Finnish has lost palatalization, characteristic of Uralic languages, the eastern dialects and the Karelian language have redeveloped it. For example, the Karelian word d'uuri , with a palatalized , is reflected by juuri in Finnish and Savo dialect vesj is vesi in standard Finnish.
The phoneme can vary allophonically between i.e. vihko , kahvi , raha .
A feature of Finnic phonology is the development of labial and rounded vowels in non-initial syllables, as in the word tyttö. Proto-Uralic had only "a", "ä" and "i" in non-initial syllables; modern Finnish allows other vowels in non-initial syllables, although they are less common.
The main stress is always on the first syllable, and is in average speech articulated by adding approximately 100 ms more length to the stressed vowel. Stress does not cause any measurable modifications in vowel quality (very much unlike English). However, stress is not strong and words appear evenly stressed. In some cases, stress is so weak that the highest points of volume, pitch and other indicators of "articulation intensity" are not on the first syllable, although native speakers recognize the first syllable as being stressed.
Vowel harmony is a redundancy feature, which means that the feature ±back is uniform within a word, and so it is necessary to interpret it only once for a given word. It is meaning-distinguishing in the initial syllable, and suffixes follow; so, if the listener hears ±back in any part of the word, they can derive ±back for the initial syllable. For example, from the stem tuote ('product') one derives t uotteeseens a ('into his product'), where the final vowel becomes the back vowel "a" (rather than the front vowel "ä") because the initial syllable contains the back vowels "uo". This is especially notable because vowels "a" and "ä" are different, meaning-distinguishing , not interchangeable or Allophone. Finnish front vowels are not Germanic umlaut, though the ⟨ä⟩ and ⟨ö⟩ feature dieresis.
Consonant gradation is a partly nonproductive lenition process for P, T and K in inherited vocabulary, with the oblique stem "weakened" from the nominative stem, or vice versa. For example, tar kka 'precise' has the oblique stem tar ka-, as in tarkan 'of the precise'. There is also another gradation pattern, which is older, and causes simple elision of T and K in suffixes. However, it is very common since it is found in the partitive case marker: if V is a single vowel, V+ta → Va, e.g. *tarkka+ta → tarkkaa.
Some orthographical notes:
Although Finnish orthography is mostly shallow, there are a few differences:
When the appropriate characters are not available, the graphemes and are usually converted to and , respectively. This is common in e-mail addresses and other electronic media where there may be no support for characters outside the basic ASCII character set. Writing them as and , following German usage, is rarer and usually considered incorrect, but formally used in passports and equivalent situations. Both conversion rules have minimal pairs which would no longer be distinguished from each other.
The sounds and are not a part of the Finnish language itself and have been introduced by the Finnish national languages body for more phonologically accurate transcription of loanwords (such as Tšekki, 'Czech Republic') and foreign names. For technical reasons or convenience, the graphemes and are often used in quickly or less carefully written texts instead of and . This is a deviation from the phonetic principle, and as such is liable to cause confusion, but the damage is minimal as the transcribed words are foreign in any case. Finnish does not use the sounds , or , but for the sake of exactitude, they can be included in spelling. (The recommendation cites the Russian opera Khovanshchina]] as an example.) Many speakers pronounce all of them , or distinguish only between and , because Finnish has no voiced sibilants.
The language may be identified by its distinctive lack of the letters and .
The morphosyntactic alignment of Finnish is nominative–accusative, but there are two object Grammatical case: accusative and partitive. The contrast between accusative and partitive object cases is one of telicity, where the accusative case denotes actions completed as intended (Ammuin hirven 'I shot the/an elk (dead)'), and the partitive case denotes incomplete actions (Ammuin hirveä 'I shot (at) the/an elk'). Often telicity is confused with perfectivity, but these are distinct notions. Finnish in fact has a Periphrasis perfective aspect, which in addition to the two inflectional tenses (past and present), yield a Germanic-like system consisting of four tense-aspect combinations: simple present, simple past, perfect (present + perfective aspect) and pluperfect (past + perfective aspect). No morphological future tense is needed; context and the telicity contrast in object grammatical case serve to disambiguate present events from future events. For example, syön kalan 'I eat a fish (completely)' must denote a future event, since there is no way to completely eat a fish at the current moment (the moment the eating is complete, the simple past tense or the perfect must be used). By contrast, syön kalaa 'I eat a fish (not yet complete)' denotes a present event by indicating ongoing action.
Finnish has three grammatical persons; Finite verb verbs agree with subject nouns in person and number by way of suffixes. The (dictionary form) infinitive bears the suffix -ta/-tä (often Lenition to -(d)a/-(d)ä due to consonant gradation). There is a so-called "passive voice" (sometimes called impersonal or indefinite) which differs from a true passive in various respects. Transitivity is distinguished in the derivational morphology of verbs, e.g. ratkaista 'to solve something' vs. ratketa 'to solve by itself'. There are also several frequentative and momentane affixes which form new verbs derivationally.
Here are some of the more common such suffixes. Which of each pair is used depends on the word being suffixed in accordance with the rules of vowel harmony.
| +Examples of Finnish derivational suffixes on nouns !Suffix !Used to create... !Example(s) !Notes | |||
| -ja / -jä | Agent noun from verbs | lukea 'to read' → lukija 'reader' | |
| kirja 'a book' → kirjasto 'a library' laiva 'a ship' → laivasto 'navy, fleet' | |||
| instruments or tools | kirjata 'to book, to file' → kirjain 'a letter' (of the alphabet) vatkata 'to whisk' → vatkain 'a whisk, mixer' | ||
| agents or instruments | kaivaa 'to dig' → kaivuri 'an excavator' laiva 'a ship' → laivuri 'shipper, shipmaster' | ||
| result nouns from verbs | tulla 'to come' → tulos 'result, outcome' tehdä 'to do' → teos 'a piece of work' | ||
| indicating the lack of something | onni 'happiness' → onneton 'unhappy'
koti 'home' → koditon 'homeless' | ||
| adjectives from nouns | itse 'self' → itsekäs 'selfish'
neuvo 'advice' → neuvokas 'resourceful' | ||
| adjectives from verbs | taitaa 'to be able' → taitava 'skillful' johtaa 'to lead' → johtava 'leading' | ||
| adjectives from nouns | lapsi 'child' → lapsellinen 'childish' kauppa 'a shop, commerce' → kaupallinen 'commercial' | ||
| locations (places related to the stem) | kana 'a hen' → kanala 'a henhouse' pappi 'a priest' → pappila 'a parsonage' | ||
| inhabitants (of places), among others | Englanti 'England' → englantilainen 'English person/thing' Venäjä 'Russia' → venäläinen 'Russian person or thing'. | formed from -la / -lä plus -inen]] |
While early borrowings, possibly even into Proto-Uralic, from very early Indo-European languages can be found, Finnic languages, including Finnish, have borrowed in particular from Baltic and Germanic languages, and to a lesser extent from Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages (all of which are subgroupings of Indo-European). Furthermore, a certain group of very basic and neutral words exists in Finnish and other Finnic languages that are absent from other Uralic languages, but without a recognizable etymology from any known language. These words are usually regarded as the last remnant of the Paleo-European language spoken in Fennoscandia before the arrival of the proto-Finnic language. Words included in this group are e.g. jänis (hare), musta (black), saari (island), suo (swamp) and niemi (cape (geography)).
Also some place names, like Päijänne and Imatra, are probably from before the proto-Finnic era.Häkkinen, Kaisa. Suomalaisten esihistoria kielitieteen valossa (). Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura 1996. See pages 166 and 173.
Often quoted loan examples are kuningas 'king' and ruhtinas 'prince, high ranking nobleman' from Germanic *kuningaz and *druhtinaz—they display a remarkable tendency towards phonological conservation within the language. Another example is äiti 'mother' (from Germanic *aiþį̄), which is interesting because borrowing of close-kinship vocabulary is a rare phenomenon. The original Finnish emo and emä occurs only in restricted contexts. There are other close-kinship words that are loaned from Baltic and Germanic languages (morsian 'bride', armas 'dear', huora 'whore'). Examples of the ancient Iranian loans are vasara 'hammer' from Avestan vadžra, vajra and orja 'slave' from Aryan, airya 'man' (the latter probably via similar circumstances as slave from Slavic peoples in many European languages).
More recently, Swedish has been a prolific source of borrowings, and also, the Swedish language acted as a proxy for European words, especially those relating to government. Present-day Finland was a part of Sweden from the 12th century and was ceded to Russia in 1809, becoming an autonomous Grand Duchy. Swedish was retained as the official language and language of the upper class even after this. When Finnish was accepted as an official language, it gained legal equal status with Swedish. During the period of autonomy, Russian did not gain much ground as a language of the people or the government. Nevertheless, quite a few words were subsequently acquired from Russian language (especially in older Helsinki slang) but not to the same extent as with Swedish. In all these cases, borrowing has been partly a result of geographical proximity.
Especially words dealing with administrative or modern culture came to Finnish from Swedish, sometimes reflecting the oldest Swedish form of the word (lag – laki, 'law'; län – lääni, 'province'; bisp – piispa, 'bishop'; jordpäron – peruna, 'potato'), and many more survive as informal synonyms in spoken or dialectal Finnish (e.g. likka, from Swedish flicka, 'girl', usually tyttö in Finnish).
Some Slavic loanwords are old or very old, thus hard to recognize as such, and concern everyday concepts, e.g. papu 'bean', raja 'border' and pappi 'priest'. Notably, a few religious words such as Raamattu ('Bible') are borrowed from Old East Slavic, which indicates language contact preceding the Swedish era. This is mainly believed to be result of trade with Novgorod from the 9th century on and Russian Orthodox missions in the east in the 13th century.
Most recently, and with increasing impact, English has been the source of new in Finnish. Unlike previous geographical borrowing, the influence of English is largely cultural and reaches Finland by many routes, including international business, music, film and TV (foreign films and programmes, excluding ones intended for a very young audience, are shown subtitled), literature, and the Web – the latter is now probably the most important source of all non-face-to-face exposure to English.
The importance of English as the language of global commerce has led many non-English companies, including Finland's Nokia, to adopt English as their official operating language. Recently, it has been observed that English borrowings are also ousting previous borrowings, for example the switch from treffailla 'to date' (from Swedish, träffa) to deittailla from English 'to go for a date'. from English are also found, e.g. kovalevy (hard disk), and so are grammatical calques, for example, the replacement of the impersonal (passiivi) with the English-style generic you, e. g. sä et voi 'you cannot', instead of the proper impersonal ei voida 'one cannot' or impersonal third-person singular ei voi 'one cannot'. This construct, however, is limited to colloquial language, as it is against the standard grammar.
However, Finnish and English have a considerably different Finnish grammar, phonology and phonotactics, discouraging direct borrowing. English loan words in Finnish slang include for example pleikkari 'PlayStation', hodari 'hot dog', and hedari 'headache', 'headshot' or 'headbutt'. Often these loanwords are distinctly identified as slang or jargon, rarely being used in a negative mood or in formal language. Since English and Finnish grammar, pronunciation and phonetics differ considerably, most loan words are inevitably sooner or later – translated into native Finnish – retaining the semantic meaning. Moreover, neologisms are coined actively not only by the government, but also by the media.
Neologisms are actively generated by the Language Planning Office and the media. They are widely adopted. One would actually give an old-fashioned or rustic impression using forms such as kompuutteri (computer) or kalkulaattori (calculator) when the neologism is widely adopted.
| (Hyvää) huomenta! | (Good) morning! | |
| (Hyvää) päivää! | (Good) day! | used on greeting and also when taking farewell |
| (Hyvää) iltaa! | (Good) evening! | used on greeting and also when taking farewell |
| Hyvää yötä! Öitä! | Good night! Night! | |
| Terve | lit. 'Healthy!' | Used on greeting, modified as Terve vaan! ('health continue!') |
| Moro
Hei(ppa)
Moi(kka) | Hi! / Bye! | Used on greeting and also when taking farewell |
| Moi moi! Hei hei! | Bye! | Used when taking farewell |
| Nähdään | See you later! | Lit. the passive form of nähdä 'to see' |
| Näkemiin | Goodbye! | Lit. 'Until seeing', illative of the third infinitive |
| Hyvästi | Goodbye/Farewell | |
| Hauska tutustua! Hauska tavata! | Nice to meet you! | Hauska tutustua is literally 'nice to get acquainted', and hauska tavata is literally 'nice to meet' |
| Mitä kuuluu? Miten menee? | How are you? How's it going? | Mitä (sinulle/teille) kuuluu is literally 'what (to you) is heard?' or 'what concerns you?' |
| Kiitos hyvää Kiitos hyvin | Fine, thank you. Well, thank you. | Kiitos hyvää is an appropriate response to Mitä kuuluu?, whereas Kiitos hyvin is an appropriate response to Miten menee? |
| Tervetuloa! | Welcome! | Tervetuloa is used in a broader range of contexts in Finnish than in English; for example to mean 'looking forward to seeing you' after arranging a visit |
| Anteeksi | Excuse me | |
| Kiitos Kiitoksia | Thanks/Please | Kiitos /kiitoksia are literally 'thanks', but are also used when requesting something, like 'please' in English |
| Kiitos, samoin | Thank you, likewise | Lit. 'thank you, the same way' (used as a response to well-wishing) |
| Ole hyvä | You're welcome | Lit. 'be good', also used when giving someone something to mean 'here you are' |
| Kyllä | Certainly/yes | |
| Joo | Yeah | More informal than kyllä |
| Ei | No/it is not | |
| Voitko auttaa? | Can you help? | |
| Apua! | Help! | |
| Totta kai!
Tietysti!
Toki! | Certainly! | |
| (Paljon) onnea | Good luck/congratulations | |
| Olen pahoillani | I'm sorry | |
| Odota | Wait | |
| Pieni hetki
Pikku hetki
Hetkinen | One moment | |
| Otan osaa | My condolences | |
| (Minä) ymmärrän. | I understand. | |
| En ymmärrä. | I don't understand. | |
| Suomi | Finland | |
| Suomi Suomen kieli | Finnish (language) | |
| Suomalainen | (noun) Finn; (adjective) Finnish |
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