Finnish style guide¶
Write standard Finnish with the house voice and the product's terminology. Use Kielitoimiston sanakirja for word forms and Kielitoimiston ohjepankki for grammar and punctuation. The shared localization review covers facts, accessibility and testing.
Address and meaning¶
Use second-person singular in house instructions: Avaa tiedosto., Valitse kansio. The verb often identifies the reader without sinä. Omit a repeated pronoun when the reference is clear, but retain it when it distinguishes people or emphasizes ownership. Singular address is a house preference, not a claim that polite plural address is ungrammatical.
Use me when the organization actually acts. Name the application when its responsibility matters; use an actor-neutral construction when the actor is unknown or irrelevant. Do not turn an instruction addressed to the reader into first-person speech. Haluatko jatkaa? already addresses the reader without a separate you.
Choose natural expressions without altering evidence. A product key that failed is not necessarily wrong: Tuoteavaimen käyttö epäonnistui. reports the failure without diagnosing the key. Preserve the difference between restarting an installer and restarting the operating system, and between resuming the interrupted task and returning to unspecified normal operation.
Keep warnings about unsaved work applicable to the reader and other affected people. Retain whether loss is possible or certain. Keep invalid properties distinct from missing properties; a rewrite must not turn both into empty required fields. Preserve consent, the exact data used for personalization and whether that use is optional.
Prefer familiar wording, such as jos where it means if, and avoid bureaucratic padding. Technical terms belong where the reader needs them. Do not omit a qualifier, change a recommendation into a requirement, replace proprietary with patented, or introduce a faster-than-before claim merely to make a sentence sound natural. Adapt an idiom's meaning; do not substitute a different promise.
Use accurate, inclusive role names. Asiantuntija and käyttäjä describe roles without assigning gender; hän does not specify a person's gender. Preserve singular scope and actual permissions. A parent and a legal guardian are not interchangeable just because both can be adults responsible for a child. Respect the person's preferred description of disability rather than applying a mechanical euphemism list.
Cases, agreement and counts¶
Finnish case endings carry relationships that English often expresses with separate words. Check the whole noun phrase and the governing construction.
| Form | Example |
|---|---|
| Singular nominative | uusi tiedosto |
| Singular genitive | uuden tiedoston |
| Singular partitive | uutta tiedostoa |
| Plural nominative | uudet tiedostot |
| Plural genitive | uusien tiedostojen |
| Plural partitive | uusia tiedostoja |
| One file | 1 tiedosto |
| Two files | 2 tiedostoa |
Object case depends on syntax and meaning. Tallenna tiedosto. asks for a complete action; Tallensin tiedoston. reports that action with a personal verb; Älä tallenna tiedostoa. is negative. Do not replace these noun forms with one invariant string. See the official guidance on genitive and nominative objects and partitive objects.
After an ordinary count above one, the following noun is commonly singular partitive, as in 2 tiedostoa. This does not make the same form suitable in every sentence. Test zero, one, several, large values and any supported fractions with the actual message system. Do not turn one page into several pages to avoid sivu(i)lla; supply complete singular and plural messages instead.
Location and movement need distinct cases. Valikossa, valikosta and valikkoon express in, from and into a menu. Leikepöydällä, leikepöydältä and leikepöydälle use the external local cases for the clipboard. Select the construction that fits the product behavior; an old catalog of preferred suffixes cannot settle every meaning of screen, server or site.
Possessive endings also carry meaning: tilisi can identify your account. Avoid repeating every English your, but retain whose account or data changes. If the form is ambiguous in context, name the owner explicitly rather than relying on a suffix alone.
Names, labels and variables¶
Inflect ordinary names when the result stays clear. For an exact interface label, retain the displayed wording and let a descriptive noun carry the ending: Valitse Tallenna nimellä -painike. The label Tallenna nimellä remains intact. Do not capitalize or change its wording to make it resemble an English title.
A multiword expression used as the first part of a compound has a space before the hyphen: Tallenna nimellä -painike, FontLab 8 -ohjelma. A single-word name has no such space: FontLab-ohjelma. Use the hyphen, not a range dash. See the official compound guidance.
For a filename, Tiedostoa ”{filename}” ei voi avata. inflects the known noun and keeps the variable intact. Do not append -sta, a colon ending or another suffix to an arbitrary product token. Its possible values may require different endings or already include formatting. Use a complete descriptive construction or real variants for the supported object types.
Keep parser tokens, escapes, markup, identifiers and filenames exact. A format token's meaning comes from its formatter, not from a generic list claiming that every %c is a letter. Test substituted values, long names, punctuation and text expansion in the running interface. Follow messages and variables.
Compounds and abbreviations¶
Write established compounds together: tiedostonimi, käyttäjätili, sähköpostiviesti. Do not create a long string by mechanically joining English words with hyphens. A genitive phrase or shorter reference can be clearer when the relationship stays unambiguous. A website and a browser remain different things even when both can lose a redundant web prefix.
Use familiar abbreviations where useful; esim. is not forbidden Finnish. Writing esimerkiksi can be clearer in short explanatory prose. Explain unfamiliar technical abbreviations, and do not invent a Finnish initialism merely because a term has been translated. Preserve exact forms such as OpenType, UTF-8 and kB.
Abbreviation inflection depends on how the abbreviation is read. Letter-by-letter forms commonly use a colon, as in PDF:n; word-like names can take an ending directly, as in Naton. Consult the official inflection guidance for the particular type and ending. Do not confuse these endings with a hyphenated compound such as PDF-tiedosto.
Instructions and message states¶
Use an imperative for a procedural step. A topic heading can use an action noun: Tiedoston tallentaminen. The instruction is Tallenna tiedosto. A -minen noun is not itself an imperative. Keep a real window title or control's exact wording rather than imposing one grammatical form on every surface.
| State | Example |
|---|---|
| Command | Tallenna tiedosto. |
| In progress | Tiedoston tallennus on käynnissä. |
| Complete | Tiedosto on tallennettu. |
| Past failure | Tiedoston tallennus epäonnistui. |
| Current limitation | Tiedostoa ei voi tallentaa. |
Preserve tense and completion. Tiedostoa ei löytynyt. reports a past search failure; Tiedostoa ei löydy. describes a current failure to find it. Add a verified cause and useful recovery where available. Do not invent a cause or promise that retrying will work.
Use passive or actor-neutral wording where it is natural, but do not prohibit active sentences with a known actor. Muisti and levytila refer to different resources. State which is insufficient. Keep a warning's condition, affected data and possible consequence. Follow interface feedback.
Keep a purpose clause only when it helps explain the action. Avoid both forced nonfinite constructions and automatic rewrites that insert an optional jos haluat into a required step. Future meaning can be expressed with a time reference; do not manufacture a distinct future form for every English will.
Capitalization and punctuation¶
Use sentence case for new headings and controls. Ordinary language and nationality adjectives remain lowercase. Preserve capitals and diacritics in proper names and exact labels: ÄÖÅ, KÄYTÄ. Use formatting to distinguish interface text from prose.
Finnish often starts a single explanatory sentence after a colon with lowercase. A following group of several sentences starts each with a capital; direct quotations and proper names have their own requirements. Apply that distinction to the actual construction. See Kielitoimiston ohjepankki on colons.
A question does not need a separate question word. Haluatko jatkaa? and Tallennetaanko tiedosto? use -ko/-kö forms and take question marks. A verb in the passive is still a verb, so the latter is not a fragment. The question-mark guidance distinguishes direct questions from embedded ones.
Use Finnish ”…” quotation marks in typographic prose; keep literal straight quotes in code. Use quotations where they serve a purpose, and use house formatting for cited controls. Parentheses stay close to their contents. Apply Finnish clause punctuation rather than copying English commas; for example, Kun tiedosto on tallennettu, voit sulkea ikkunan.
Keep list items grammatically parallel and compatible with their introduction. Complete sentences take full stops; labels and parallel fragments usually do not. Preserve an existing control's punctuation and ellipsis. Prefer a colon to a parenthetical dash; space an en dash used as an aside, and leave a simple range unspaced: sivut 3–6. Use the mathematical minus in numeric examples.
Numbers and spacing¶
Use a decimal comma in ordinary values: 12,5, 0,5. Group large numbers with spaces: 10 250,75. Keep nonbreaking spaces within a group and before a unit, currency or percent sign when they should stay together: 12,5 mm, 1 250 €, 50 %, −18 °C. See the official guidance on decimals and percent signs.
Percentages and percentage-point changes are different quantities. Keep units, magnitude and currency unchanged, and retain exact parser formats. 1.2.0 is a version string, not a localized decimal. Use digits for exact interface values, counts and measurements; the small-number spelling preference for running text does not govern every technical field.
Write an unambiguous date such as 13. syyskuuta 2026. Preserve ordinal punctuation and the required time format and time zone. Write ja for and in Finnish prose; keep literal symbols in names, formulas and code. Nonbreaking spaces are useful online too: test the rendered text and spoken output instead of banning them.
Keyboard wording and speech¶
Use names appropriate to the actual keyboard and platform. Finnish terms include sarkain, vaihto, välilyönti, askelpalautin and nuolinäppäimet. Preserve an actual Ctrl, Control, Enter or other key label when it matters. Verify access keys, shortcuts, focus and numeric-keypad behavior in the product.
Use Valitse for input-independent selection when that describes the action. Keep Napsauta, dragging or another gesture when the task depends on that input. One verb per sentence is not an accessibility requirement. Provide meaningful accessible labels and test the task.
Use established Finnish pronunciation and an approved reading of names. Check acronym pronunciations individually. Read every character needed to reproduce a URL, command or version, including a meaningful piste. Align narration with the action and follow the shared audiovisual guidance.