Jonne

Formal and informal Finnish


The Finnish linguistic situation is to some extent comparable to that of much of the Arabic speaking world, where Classical Arabic is used in official and religious speech and in the literature, whereas colloquial forms of Arabic are used in everyday conversation and in personal letters.

There are two main varieties of Finnish used throughout the country. One is the yleiskieli, or the general language, and the other puhekieli, or the speaking language. Dialects of puhekieli are divided to two main groups; Western and Eastern dialects. Yleiskieli is usually used in formal situations like church sermons, political speech and newscasts. Its written form, kirjakieli, is used nearly in all of the written texts, not always excluding even the dialogue of common people in popular prose. Kirjakieli means the book language. Puhekieli, on the other hand, is the main variety of Finnish to be used in popular TV and radio shows, at workplaces and it is sometimes preferred to speaking a dialect in personal communication. Also, the kirjakieli is quite rare in personal letters and in conversations in the Internet.

The puhekieli has mostly developed naturally from earlier forms of Finnish, and spread from main cultural and political centers. The kirjakieli, however, has always been a consciously constructed medium for literature. It preserves grammatical patterns that have mostly vanished from the colloquial varieties and, as its main application is writing, it features complex syntactic patterns that are not easy to handle when used in speech. The puhekieli develops significantly faster, and the grammatical simplifications includes also the most common pronouns and suffixes, which sums up to frequent but modest differences.

Finnish children usually aquire the knowledge of kirjakieli when educated in school, but many children who read much learn it as their (written) "first language".

Examples
formal language — colloquial language

he menevät — ne menee (they go)
onko teillä — onks teil (do you have?)
emme sano — me ei sanota (we don't say)
(minun) kirjani — mun kirja (my book)
kuusikymmentäviisi — kuus(kyt)viis (sixty-five)
tulen — tuun (I'm coming)
väkeä — väkee (people)
punainen — punanen (red)

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-Jonne
Guess how to pronounce it

Svea

My friend was telling me about the different accents/dialects.. and he feels sorry for people who've learned in a university or something and then they go to Tampere or something and all they get is "nääs, nääs!".... well, maybe not quite that, I can't really remember much of the conversation..... there's my two pennies worth, anyway.