Finnish Alphabet & Special Characters

Finnish is written with the Latin alphabet: A to Z, followed by Å, Ä and Ö, in that order, as in Swedish. That makes 29 letters, and a Finnish dictionary ends not with z but with words such as ääni (voice, sound) and öljy (oil). Finns call the three extra letters ääkköset. Š and Ž are part of standard spelling too, but only in loanwords and foreign names, and they are sorted together with S and Z.

Native Finnish words need far fewer letters than the full alphabet. B, C, F, Q, W, X, Z, Š, Ž and Å turn up in loanwords and names: baari, faksi, Zürich, Åland. G appears in native words almost only in the pair ng, as in kengät (shoes). Spelling follows sound very closely: most letters have one basic sound value, though the long velar nasal is written ng; primary stress is on the first syllable, so readers can usually sound out Finnish words.

Length is written by doubling. A long vowel or a long consonant is two letters, and it changes the word: tuli (fire), tuuli (wind) and tulli (customs) are three different words, and so are tapan (I kill) and tapaan (I meet). Older Finnish dictionaries and phone books sorted W together with V, and Finnish sorting still files a foreign Ü with Y, so Müller stands among the names in My-.

Ä and Ö: letters of their own, not accents

The dots on ä and ö look like a German umlaut, but in Finnish these are separate letters with sounds of their own, never an a or an o with a mark added. Ä is the open vowel of English cat; ö is a front rounded vowel like German ö, close to the vowel of British nurse said with rounded lips. Y, which also belongs to this family, is the sound of German ü.

Swapping ä for a makes a different word or no word at all: sää is weather, saa means gets or may; älä means don't, ala means field or area. Ä and ö are everywhere in Finnish because of vowel harmony: a word takes either the back vowels a, o, u or the front vowels ä, ö, y (e and i go with both), and its endings follow suit. So it is talossa (in the house) but metsässä (in the forest), Helsingissä but Jyväskylässä. Writing Hyvaa paivaa for Hyvää päivää is understood, but it reads as badly broken Finnish.

Å, Š and Ž: the letters for names and loanwords

Å comes from Swedish, Finland's other official language, and appears in Swedish names: Åland (in Finnish Ahvenanmaa), Åbo (the Swedish name of Turku) and surnames such as Åström. In Finnish it is read like a Finnish o.

Š and Ž write the sounds of English sh and the s in pleasure in loanwords and in names from languages such as Russian and Czech: šakki (chess), šekki (cheque), Tšekki (Czechia), Tšaikovski, Brežnev. Both shakki and šakki are used, as are sekki and šekki for cheque; the Institute recommends using š and ž rather than sh and zh in foreign names.

Finnish punctuation: ” quotes, the dash and the colon

Finnish quotation marks point the same way at both ends: the right double quotation mark ” opens and closes a quote, ”Moi!” hän sanoi. A quote inside a quote uses ’ the same way, and some books and newspapers use the guillemet » at both ends instead: »Moi!». Typing the English pair “ ” is a common slip in Finnish text.

The ajatusviiva (thought dash) is the en dash – with a space on each side: Hän tuli – ja lähti. The same dash, without spaces, marks ranges such as 9–17. Finnish also has a use for the colon that English lacks: case endings on abbreviations, numbers and symbols follow a colon, so EU:n (of the EU), USA:ssa (in the USA) and 5:llä (with five). Numbers take a decimal comma and dates are written with full stops: 3,5 kg, 6.12.2026.

How to type Finnish letters on a keyboard and phone

The Finnish keyboard layout, the same as the Swedish one, has its own keys for Å (right of P), Ö (right of L) and Ä (next to Ö); AltGr+E types €. On an English keyboard in Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: Alt+0228 ä, Alt+0196 Ä, Alt+0246 ö, Alt+0214 Ö, Alt+0229 å, Alt+0197 Å, Alt+0154 š, Alt+0138 Š, Alt+0158 ž, Alt+0142 Ž, Alt+0148 ”, Alt+0146 ’, Alt+0187 », Alt+0150 – and Alt+0128 €. With the US-International layout, AltGr+Q gives ä, AltGr+P ö and AltGr+W å (add Shift for capitals), or press " then a or o.

On a Mac, Option+U then a or o types ä and ö, Option+A types å and Option+Shift+A Å; Option+Shift+[ gives ”, Option+Shift+] ’, Option+- the en dash and Option+Shift+2 €. For š and ž, switch to the ABC – Extended layout and press Option+V, then s or z. On iPhone and Android, hold a, o, s or z and slide to ä å, ö, š or ž, or add the Finnish keyboard for Finnish autocorrect. In HTML the entities are ä ö å š ž ” and –, or paste the characters straight from this page.

Where Finnish is spoken

Finnish has an estimated 5.8 million speakers. CLDR estimates a literate, functional Finnish population of about 5.3 million in Finland 🇫🇮, where Finnish and Swedish are the two national languages and Finnish is the language of most people; since 1995 it has also been an official language of the European Union, and prices are in euros, written after the amount: 12,50 €. CLDR's literate, functional Finnish-language population estimate is roughly 250,000 in Estonia 🇪🇪, where many people learned Finnish from television; roughly 230,000 in Sweden 🇸🇪, where Finnish is an official minority language of the Sweden Finns; and about 14,000 in Russia, in Karelia and around St Petersburg.

Finnish is a Finnic language of the Uralic family, not related to Swedish or the other Germanic languages around it. Its closest large relative is Estonian, whose alphabet also has Ä and Ö, as well as Õ and Ü; Hungarian is a distant cousin in the same family. See the Estonian, Swedish and Hungarian collections for their letters, and the Finland collection for the flag, food and other emoji of the country.