Colloquial Finnish

Colloquial Finnish ("suomen puhekieli") is the standard colloquial dialect of the Finnish language. It is spoken in the Greater Helsinki region, and in urbanized areas in the Tavastian and Central Finland dialectal areas, such as the cities of Tampere, Jyväskylä, Lahti, Hyvinkää, and Hämeenlinna. In addition, this applies also to the coastal cities, such as Vaasa and Porvoo, which have been traditionally Swedish-speaking and have experienced an influx of Finnish speakers from a variety of dialectal areas.
The standard language takes most of its features from these dialects, i.e. most "dialectal" features are reductions with respect to this form of language. The combination of the common spoken Finnish and a dialect gives a regional variant ("aluepuhekieli"), which has some local idiosyncrasies but is essentially similar to the common spoken Finnish.
The basics of Finnish needed to fully understand this article can be found in pages about Finnish phonology and Finnish grammar.
Introduction.
As in any language, the spoken version(s) of Finnish often vary from the written form. Some of the latter's constructs are either too arbitrary (e.g. "soft d", cf. Finnish phonology), or too dialectal, e.g. "hän" (see below), for use in the spoken language. Furthermore, some very common and "accentless" sound changes are not reflected in the standard language, particularly fusion, liaison and some diphthong reductions.
There is also the problem that purists want to avoid irregularity regardless of actual usage. This has left some sound changes common in spoken language out from the standard language. There is a tendency to favor "more logical" constructs over easily pronounceable ones. This ideal does reflect spoken Finnish usage to a degree, as Finnish is demonstrably a conservative language with few reduction processes, but it is not entirely accurate. The problem of avoiding "irregularity" is most evident in spelling, where internal sandhi is not transcribed, because there is the idea that morphemes should be immutable. For example, the "correct" spelling is "syönpä" ("I eat" with emphasis), even though the pronunciation is usually "syömpä". The explanation is that "-n-" and "-pä" are in different morphemes just like the explanation that English "boys" is not spelled with a "z" is that they are in different morphemes.
There are also a number of grammatical forms which are used in written Finnish, but only very rarely in spoken. For example, there are a number of constructions using participles which are usually rendered analytically in speech. Some cases and moods are rarely constructive in spoken Finnish, e.g. the instructive and comitative cases and the potential mood. Some survive only in expressions.
On the other hand, spoken language has its own features rarely or never found in formal language. Most importantly, there is very common external sandhi, and some assimilatory sound changes. (On the contrary, there is no vowel reduction.) In some variants (e.g. Vaasa, Kymenlaakso) of spoken Finnish "-n kanssa" is abbreviated into a clitic that is effectively a comitative case, e.g. "-nkans" or "-nkaa".
Pronunciation.
Reflexes of dental fricatives.
The most common reflexes for old Finnish dental fricatives are for , and or for . For example, "metsä, metsän" or "mettä, metän" ← "meθθä, meθän" "forest, of the forest" and "meidän" < "meiðän" "ours". Loss of also occurs, e.g. "meiän". These are seen as "accent-free" pronunciations. Dialects generally have different reflexes — in fact, the different reflexes are used as a distinguishing feature between different dialects. For more details, see Finnish phonology.
Word-final "n".
One important sound change, which has gone to completion in Estonian but occurs idiosyncratically in Finnish, is mutation of word-final into a glottal stop , orthographically represented by an apostrophe. In some dialects, such as Savo, word-final is systematically replaced by , e.g. "isä'iän" ← "isän ääni" "father's voice". Both pronunciations can be heard in the Helsinki area. This means that the genitive/accusative form "-n", which is very common in any form of Finnish, is simply noted by a glottal stop. However, this glottal stop undergoes sandhi whenever followed by consonant, or more often than not (see below).
Final vowels.
Certain words that end in /si/ in Standard Finnish occur without the word-final /i/ in the spoken language, unless followed by case endings.
Particularly in Helsinki, deletion of /æ/ or /ɑ/, spelt «ä» and «a», respectively, in highly frequent words is common. This is a feature of Western Finnish dialects, found also in Savonian dialects and Estonian. 
Vowel clusters and diphthongs.
Word-final vowel clusters ending in or have much variation in dialects of Finnish. Especially in Helsinki they assimilate, where only the resulting chroneme marks the partitive in many words.
An or cluster also appears in many adjectives:
In other areas of Finland, these clusters may have a different fate. Another common dialectal variant is the raising of to in the adjectives: "pimiä". (Partitives are unaffected by this.) Some rarer versions of this suffix include "-jä / -ja", "-ie", and even "-ii".
Similar to the diphthongization of older to (unchanged in standard Estonian), many eastern dialects of Finnish diphthongize also the long vowels to . In Savonian dialects, these have shifted further on to .
 can become when in contact with another vowel. In many cases this results from colloquial deletion of . For example:
Sandhi.
A related phenomenon is the final consonant sandhi. When two words co-occur in the same prosodic unit, the consonant beginning the second word assimilates to the word-final consonant in the first word, creating a long consonant. This is not commonly written down, except in dialectal transcriptions. For example, 
Personal pronouns.
Some dialects have the full-length personal pronouns "minä" and "sinä", but most people use shorter forms, like these found in Greater Helsinki region:
Note: these do differ depending on where the speaker is from. For example "minä" can also be "mie", "miä", "mää" etc.
The root words are also shorter:
The third-person pronouns "hän" ('he' or 'she') and "he" ('they'), are rarely used in the spoken language outside of Southwestern Finland and are getting rare there, as well. Elsewhere, they are usually replaced by "se" and "ne", which in the standard language do not refer to people. 
For example, the sentence "Did he mistake me for you?" has these forms:
Similarly, non-personal demonstrative pronouns are often used in place of "hän" or "he", meaning people may be referred to as 'that' and 'those'. This also does not carry any pejorative meaning. The words are also changed from their written form.
For example, when pointing out a culprit, the sentence "He broke it." has these forms:
Numerals.
Numerals 1-10 in colloquial spoken Finnish:
Numbers 11-19 are formed by appending -toista, which can be shortened to -toist. Numbers 20-90 are formed by appending -kymmentä, which can be shortened to -kymment or even -kyt(ä). "Kolme", "neljä" and "seittemän" can be abbreviated to "kol-", "nel-" and "seit-" with "-kytä", but not independently, as in "kolkytäkolme" "33" or "seitkytäneljä" "74".
When counting out loud, even shorter forms are used, mostly one-syllable words with long vowels:
-toista becomes -toi, -too or even -to. -kymmentä becomes -kyt, with 20-60 typically retaining their longer numeral forms (e.g. "kakskyt" rather than **kaakyt for 20). 70 is typically "seitkyt" or "seiskyt", while 80 and 90 do with kasi- and ysi-.
The numerals 1–9 have their own names, different from the cardinal numbers used in counting. Numbers that have longer names are often shortened in speech. This may be problematic for a foreigner to understand, if she/he/it has learnt words by book:
The "-kko" suffix normally denotes a group of x people, but on 8 and 9, it doubles as a synonym for the numeral's name. "Kahdeksikko" is also used to describe a figure eight shape.
The regular "-Onen" / "-inen" forms can additionally be used of objects with an ID number. For example, bus 107 is called "sataseiska", and a competition winner is an "ykkönen" (not "*sataseittemän" or "*yks".)
Verbs.
Pronoun usage.
Personal pronouns are used extensively in spoken Finnish whereas in formal forms the pronoun is often optional (indicated in brackets in this article). Furthermore, the pronouns themselves in spoken Finnish are different from those used in formal Finnish.
Personal pronouns mä and sä are used extensively in colloquial Finnish in place of minä and sinä (I and singular you). The pronouns se and ne, which in the formal language are used only as non-human personal pronouns meaning (it and they), are used in the spoken language as personal pronouns (which in the formal language would be hän and he (singular they and plural they).
See the tables below for examples.
Verb forms.
One striking difference between colloquial Finnish and formal Finnish is use of the passive form in the first person plural. Thus for example:
Another is that the third person plural suffix -vat or -vät is not used in the spoken language; instead, the third person "singular" form is used with plural meaning being conveyed by the pronoun ne (they)
Therefore, the full present-tense paradigm of "puhua" "to speak" in everyday speech is:
Some "e"-stem verbs have abbreviated (irregular) oblique forms, where /n/ or /l/ is elided. This class includes only four frequently used verbs. In Finnish, verbs have an infinitive form, marked with "-ta" and used in the infinitive, and an oblique form, which is used in personal forms. Consonant gradation and assimilation of the 't' in "-ta" may be applied. In the standard language, the correspondence between the two is always regular. In spoken language, some verbs have assimilated oblique forms, while retaining the regular infinitive:
For example, these forms, as such, are represented by the imperatives:
To demonstrate the use of the personal form, the reply is:
The infinitives are unchanged, as in:
As are participles, despite them using the oblique stem:
The 't' at the end of participles ending "-nut, -rut, -lut, -sut" (or "-nyt" etc.) is often dropped when no consonant follows, or replaced by gemination of the following consonant:
but:
is actually pronounced as if it were:
In the formal language some pronouns are considered optional, but in spoken language the pronoun is usually enunciated but may be optional when answering questions (which puts the person in the proper context).
In the latter example, dropping "me" would change the meaning from a statement to a suggestion:
Compare the conjugation of OLLA in the formal language (Table 1) and in the spoken or colloquial language (Table 2). Table 2 shows in highlights the areas where there are differences in the structures between formal and informal. Optional pronouns are in brackets. English equivalent is in Table 3.
Questions.
In everyday speech, the "-ko/kö" suffix has the "-s" clitic added, becoming "-kos/kös", which in turn reduces to "-ks":
The choice of morphemes "-kos/kös" or "-ks" is not always purely dialectal or accidental. Many Finns regularly use more than one variation in their speech. The choice might depend among others on the rhythm of the sentence or the (wished) tempo of the discussion. Sometimes it has other clearly communicational purposes e.g. the longer variation might be used to soften an intruding question.
The clitic "-s" is also found in imperatives, e.g. "me(n)es" "(I expect you to) go!" It can also be, that the "-tkö" elides not to "-ks", but "-t" before a 's', e.g. "menetkö sä" ? "me(n)et sä". Because this is identical to "sä menet" except for the word order, questions are indicated by word order.
Possessive suffix.
Spoken language has a different grammar for the possessive suffix. In contrast, in the literary language, the pronoun is optional and typically omitted. Compare English in which, e.g., "The house to which this door belongs" would be the correct written form even though "the house whose door this is" would be the more common spoken version.
Here, the pronoun of the literary form is also shown.
Notice that Finnish has no possessive adjectives. The pronouns are regularly inflected, like if "I's house", "you's house", "we's house".
However, the suffixes "-s", "-nsa" and "-nne" are used to avoid repeating a pronoun, e.g. "He took his hat and left" is "Se otti lakkinsa ja lähti." (The translation from English *"Se otti sen lakin ja lähti" would mean "He took his/her hat and left" or "He took the (specific) hat and left").
Omission of the negative verb.
When a negative sentence is formed, the main verb goes into the imperative mood and gives all of its inflections to the negative verb "ei", e.g. "tuemme" → "emme tue". Usually the word "mitään" ("anything") and an expletive is added to the sentence. This means that even if the negative verb "ei" is left out, the meaning is indicated by this context. For example:
This omission of the negative verb "ei" is considered one of the most recent changes in Finnish. Usually this construction indicates mistrust or frustration. (There is a less than serious text calling this "aggressiivi", see aggressive mood.) However, it can be a neutral negative statement: "Tästä artikkelista mitään opi" (From this article, you don't learn anything).
Regional variation.
Linguists such as Mielikäinen argue that the dialects of Finnish have been considerably homogenized by 20th century developments of urbanization and other internal population movements to the point that "pure" dialects have disappeared. "Local spoken languages" have developed from standard Finnish to give variety with essentially standard Finnish structure but with some local features. Considerable stigma has been associated with dialects (accurately or not) perceived as rural in the 20th century. People who have moved to the city have adopted a variety resembling standard Finnish, which has been imposed upon dialect speakers by the school, the military and the employers.
Breaking up some consonant clusters on syllable boundaries with an epenthetic vowel is a feature of several dialects, such as those of Ostrobothnia and Savonia: The neutral vowel is the same as the preceding vowel. For example, "juhla" → "juhula" "celebration", "salmi" → "salami" "strait", "palvelu" → "palavelu" "service", "halpa" → "halapa" "cheap", "äffä" → "ähävä" (via "ähvä") "letter F". Pairs of dissimilar consonants with /l/ or /h/ (in Savo, also /n/) as the first consonant are subject to epenthesis; other clusters or geminates are not. However, a strong epenthetic vowel is seen as dialectal, and in Helsinki and urbanized areas, indicates origins "in the countryside" (since for Helsinki people, everything but Helsinki is rural).
Tavastian dialects.
Tavastian dialects are diverse because other, surrounding dialects have influenced them. The following features are all found in Finnish spoken in Helsinki, and many of them occur also in some other Tavastian dialects.