Helsinki Slang - Language Characteristics

Language Characteristics

The borrowed words may violate phonological rules of the Finnish language, such as vowel harmony. They also include phonemes /b/, /d/ and /g/ and consonant clusters such as /sn/ rarely found in other Finnish dialects. Yet the words remain indisputably Finnish, incorporating Finnish grammar and mostly obeying Finnish phonotactics. Some rather arbitrary, but creative and distinctly Finnish expressive constructions are often used especially in the modern slang, e.g. päräyttää.

Furthermore, arbitrary modifications are found — these make the resulting slang words alien both to the speakers of regular Finnish and the borrowing language. For example, Finland Swedish (Sipoo dialect) burk "cranky" is modified into spurgu "drunkard", where the added 's' is arbitrary, as is the voicing change of 'k' to 'g'. Derivation of fillari, "a bicycle" from velociped is even more convoluted: velociped in the Swedish language game fikonspråk is filociped-vekon, which became filusari and further fillari — only the 'l' is etymologically original. In fact, the newer abbreviation of fillari to fiude loses even the 'l'.

Some distinctive aspects in Helsinki slang are:

• Very swift pace of pronunciation and speech
• The voiced consonants /b d ɡ/, which are rare in standard Finnish, are abundant: budjaa (to dwell), brakaa (to break, to malfunction), dorka (dork), duuni (work), gimma (girl), goisaa (to sleep). Many speakers, though, especially in the modern variety, use several of these words with voiceless /p t k/: prakaa, kimma, koisaa.
• Consonant clusters in the beginning of words, which appear natively only on south-western Finnish dialects, are commonplace, like Stadi (Helsinki), glesa (sick), skeglu (knife), flinda (bottle)
• Shortened or diminutive forms of words. Common noun endings used include -is (fleggis "open fire", kondis "condition"), -ari (Hesari the street Helsinginkatu, snagari "a grill stand") and -de (krunde and klande 'heads and tails' (< Standard Finnish kruuna and klaava 'ibid.'))
• Slang and foreign word roots do not conform to vowel harmony, although their suffixes do (Sörkka, Sörkasta pro Sörkkä, Sörkästä < Sörnäinen), Tölika pro Tölikä < Töölö, byysat pro byysät, "trousers"). This does not affect native Finnish words.
  • With some speakers this goes even further; Standard Finnish /æ/ and /ɑ/ appear to be merging as /a/, a new neutral vowel. Before the modern period, this change has happened in Estonian and other southern Finnic languages.
• Surplus S appearing in beginning of words, forming consonant clusters: stoge, "train", skoude, "policeman"
• Ceceo or lisp on /s/, pronouncing it as a sharp, dental /s̪/, or even /θ/ as in English "thing". This is considered an effeminate feature, but appears sometimes also on males' speech.