Good evening!
Let’s talk about Finnish language for a moment.
More specifically,
let’s focus on the phonemes of the Finnish language.
In Finnish, there are eight vowels:
a, e, i, o, u, y, ä and ö.
Each of these vowels is always spelled with the same letter,
so when you read this symbol, ⟨o⟩,
it is always pronounced /o/.
No exceptions.
Sometimes there can be two of these letters in row,
like this: ⟨oo⟩.
This means a long vowel.
Basically you just stretch the vowel a bit: /oː/.
The length is not exact science.
What is important is that the vowel sound does not change.
For instance, it does not become /oʊ/.
If you pronounce the long vowel as a diphthong,
your foreign background is exposed sooner –
than you can close your mouth.
Thus, Finnish has short vowels and long vowels.
a, aa, e, ee, i, ii, o, oo, u, uu, y, yy, ä, ää, ö, öö.
When two different vowels come in sequence,
like in the word “koe”,
the two vowels are both pronounced individually.
“Koe”.
In real life though, Finnish has many diphtongs,
but these are spontaneous observations rather than rules,
and it is perfectly fine to ignore them.
We can also ignore the long vowels,
because it is basically just the same vowel –
repeated twice in a row, making it twice as long.
As a general rule,
the vowel sound is unaffected by the consonant –
that precedes or follows it.
If you nasalize the vowel right before a consonant,
your Swedish background becomes immediately apparent.
The rest of phonemes are consonants.
The only trill consonant is r.
The approximants are v, l and j.
The nasal consonants are n and m,
but there is also the ng sound /ŋ/,
which is an exception,
because it is the only sound in Finnish –
that is denoted by a sequence of two letters –
and does not have its own symbol.
The fricative consonants are s and h.
The phoneme f occurs in loan words,
but it is not natively a part of Finnish.
There is just one sibilant,
and it is the voiceless alveolar sibilant, /s/.
The post-alveolar sibilant /ʃ/ occurs in some loan words,
and there is actually a letter in the Finnish alphabet for it,
but most Finns cannot pronounce this sound without practice.
The sibilant sounds are never voiced.
Most Finns cannot even pronounce sounds like /z/ and /ʒ/ –
without practice.
If you use those sounds,
the listener immediately guesses your background is Slavic.
All of the above are like vowels,
in that they can be either short or long.
For example, keno, kenno, kisa, kissa, tuli, and tulli –
are different words,
These six words all have different meanings –
that have nothing in common.
Again, the length is not exact science;
as long as it is clear from your speech,
that the phoneme is slightly longer than normal,
it counts as a long phoneme.
It is important to note —
that it is entirely a timing issue,
not an emphasis or stress issue.
Well, there are no words with a long v or a long j,
but if there were,
all Finns would know how to pronounce them.
Finally there are plosive consonants:
The unvoiced k, p, and t,
and their voiced counterparts, g, b, and d.
However, b and g sounds only occur in words of foreign origin,
and some dialects do not recognize the voiced plosives at all.
In Finnish, the plosives are not aspirated,
so instead of khaptheeni, you would say kapteeni.
If you aspirate your consonants,
the listener immediately guesses your background is English.
The plosives can also be short or long.
For example, kuka, kukka, mato, matto, rapu and rappu –
are all different words,
with meanings that have nothing in common.
Because the plosive consonants are characterized –
by a sudden sound that follows a silence,
the difference between a short and long plosive –
is how long the air is held before released.
Finally there is the glottal stop, /ʔ/.
This sound occurs sometimes before a vowel –
when the speaker wants to be clear –
where the syllable break or word break is,
or to emphasize the beginning of a word.
Example, “mä en halua” means I don’t want,
but “mä’en halua” means I really don’t want.
Sometimes the exact quality of the consonant can change –
depending on the following phonemes.
For example, if an "n" letter is followed by a "p" letter,
almost everyone pronounces it as "m" instead of "n".
For example, "kumpa" instead of "kunpa".
If the "n" letter is followed by a "k" letter instead,
most readers pronounce it as "ng",
for example "ongko" instead of "onko".
The “h” letter can be pronounced in a number of different ways –
depending on the surrounding vowels.
Examples: “pehmeä”, “lahja”, “pihvi”.
Each of these were articulated in a different part of the mouth.
These three phonemes are called allophones for the phoneme “h”,
and most native speakers are not even aware of the differences.
Again, these are spontaneously arising phenomena rather than rules.
Note, that unlike in Hebrew and English,
if there is a “h” in the text,
it’s a consonant, and it is always pronounced as “h”.
There are no silent letters in Finnish.
There is one curious exception, namely gemination.
In some cases,
a consonant is pronounced long even if it’s written short.
For example, instead of “syö hernekeittoa” you would say “syö hhernekkeittoa”.
I’m not totally sure why this happens.
It just does.
It is not something that could cause misunderstandings either way,
but a curious detail nonetheless.
Note that you can’t just go randomly duplicating phonemes.
If you pronounced “älä menekkään” as “älämmenekkään”,
the listener would have to do –
a double take to understand what you just said.
A little bit about timings.
Different languages have different ideas about how speech is timed.
In English and Swedish, for example,
the time between consecutive stressed syllables is fairly constant.
In French, each syllable takes roughly the same time.
In Japanese, each syllable also takes roughly the same time,
except that syllables with a long vowel are pronounced twice as long as regular syllables.
But Finnish is not like that.
Finnish is different.
Basically, each phoneme, represented by a single letter,
takes a constant time.
Long phonemes are represented by two letters, and they take twice the time.
There are a few exceptions though.
Again, things that just rise spontaneously from practice.
So, to recap:
Eight vowels, and about twelve consonants.
Phonetically Finnish is quite a simple language.
This is the phonetic vocabulary that a Finnish person has,
when they speak any foreign language.
As I explained in another video,
whichever phonetic background a person has from their native language –
largely determines what kind of accent they have –
when speaking another language.
The simplicity of Finnish phonetics contributes to –
the quite recognizable accent that Finnish people often have –
when they speak a language –
that has phonetically a significantly different makeup,
such as English.
We may be revisiting this topic soon in another video.
Stay tuned, and have a shalom in your life.