Finnish orthography

The Finnish orthography strives to represent all morphemes phonologically and, roughly speaking, the sound value of each letter tends to correspond with its value in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) – although some discrepancies do exist.

[4] The Finnish keyboard layout on Microsoft Windows does not include ⟨š⟩ or ⟨ž⟩; thus, in practice, only highly formal sources such as official texts, encyclopedias or Helsingin Sanomat use them.

Another informal term is skandit or skandimerkit, short for skandinaaviset merkit "Scandinavian characters" (however, the Danish and Norwegian ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨ø⟩ are usually not taken into account).

In practice, almost any diacritic situated above the base glyph (such as, á ā ã) would probably be interpreted as a carelessly written pair of dots (ä).

It would seem problematic, however, to apply the same principle to e.g. ⟨ü⟩ (u-diaeresis) as used in Spanish or ⟨õ⟩ (nasal vowel) as used in Portuguese, as these letters represent quite different orthographic traditions.

However, if the /k/ is weakened (because of a phenomenon called consonant gradation that occurs when the word is inflected), the result is a long, or geminated, velar nasal /ŋː/ that is written with digraph ⟨ng⟩, as in kengät /ˈkeŋ.ŋæt/ 'shoes'.

The treatment of the velar nasal in loanwords is highly inconsistent, often mixing the original spelling of the word with an applied Finnish pronunciation pattern.

Even many educated speakers, however, still make no distinction between voiced and voiceless plosives in regular speech, although minimal pairs exist: /ˈbus.si/ 'bus' vs. /ˈpus.si/ 'bag', /ˈɡo.ril.lɑ/ 'gorilla' vs. /ˈko.ril.lɑ/ 'with/at a basket'.

The status of /d/ is somewhat different from /b/ and /ɡ/, since it appears in native Finnish words, too, as a regular "weak" correspondence of the voiceless /t/ (as a result of consonant gradation), and even in the infinitives of many verbs, such as syödä, "to eat".

At the time when Mikael Agricola, the "father" of literary Finnish, devised a system for writing the language, this sound still had the value of the voiced dental fricative /ð/, as in English "then".

For example, historical and rare dialectal meiðän, käðen "our" (gen.), "hand" (gen.) could be: In the middle of the 19th century, a significant portion of the Swedish-speaking upper class in Finland decided that Finnish had to be made equal in usage to Swedish.

Nowadays, the Finnish language spoken by native Swedish speakers is not anymore considered paradigmatic, but as a result of their long-lasting prestige, many people particularly in the capital district acquired the new [d] sound.

In the Southwestern dialects of Rauma-Eurajoki-Laitila area, /b/, /d/ and /ɡ/ are commonplace, since the voicing of nasals spread to phonemes /p/, /t/ and /k/, making them half-voiced, e.g. /sendä/ ← sentään or /ninɡo/ ← niin kuin.