Spoken Finnish
From UniLang Wiki
A major obstacle to people learning Finnish by the book is that most Finns just don't speak that way. Written Finnish is the standard, official Finnish. Finns call it kirjakieli ("book language"). This is the language used in media, literature and education.
But when people speak, they use their local dialects filled with colloquial words, which are often shorter and easier in use than the kirjakieli equivalents. This is called puhekieli ("spoken language").
This aspect of Finnish language is often said to resmble that of Arabic.
However, this doesn't mean that kirjakieli is exclusively written Finnish. Everybody has their own manner of speaking, depending on their background, age, personal preferences... Some speak kirjakieli practically all the time, while others leave it to special cases only. For example, saying emphatically En minä tiedä ("I do not know") may get your message through better than just saying Emmä tiiä. Also it's not possible to always use se instead of hän (forms of the personal pronoun meaning "he/she"). (Example: There is a group of people standing next to you. Someone asks you: Kuka täällä on Mari?, "Who here is Mari?". You look/point at Mari and say hän or possibly tuo, but never se).
The info on these pages concerns mostly the way people speak in the Helsinki region. In other parts of Finland you might hear something else. For example, instead of mä and sä they say mää and sää in Western Finland, mie and sie in Eastern Finland.
- Verbs in spoken Finnish
- Case endings in spoken Finnish
- Suffixes in spoken Finnish
- Wordlists of spoken Finnish
- The disappearing d
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