Appendix:Finnish punctuation

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Finnish punctuation marks include:

Usage

The punctuation rules are largely similar to how they are used in English, but there are also differences. The rest of this page describes some of them.

Commas

There are many differences in the use of commas between Finnish and English.

  • The comma is used to separate the subordinate clause from the main one in Finnish much more often than in English (in Finnish, they are only omitted for short clauses, especially ones that 'share' a common word). This includes relative clauses:
    Autan sinua[,] jos ehdin.
    I will help you if I have time.
    Ne tilaajat[,] jotka...
    The subscribers that...
  • Commas are left out less often in Finnish when using coordinating conjunctions to join sentences, even if some common words are left out.
  • So-called "absolute constructions" (lauseenvastike) which use infinitive or participle forms are not set apart with a comma, even if the English equivalent would be.
    Käytyäni kaupassa[] päätin...
    Having gone to the store I decided...
  • Many uses of the comma in English to set adverbs (e.g. adjuncts, connectors) or introductory phrases apart often do not have a comma in the corresponding Finnish equivalent.
    Koulussa[] on rauhallinen tunnelma.
    In the school there is a calm atmosphere.
  • Serial commas in Finnish are used only with clauses, not with individual words.
    leipää, maitoa[] ja voita ― bread, milk and butter
    minä ehdotin, hän hyväksyi[,] ja sinä valitit. ― I suggested (it), he accepted (it) and you complained (about it).

Period

Largely used the same way as in English. However, it is not used for decimal numbers in Finnish: the comma is (2,5 for 2.5). The period is instead used with times of day: 8.30 for 8:30 (note that e.g. 2.12 is 2:12 on the clock, while 2.12. with a trailing period refers to December 2 on the calendar), although the colon is increasingly common due to English influence. The customary thousands separator in Finnish is the non-breaking space (which is however optional).

Colon

The colon is used to attach inflectional or derivational endings onto numbers, abbreviations, initialisms or individual letters: see :.

Hyphen

Besides its other uses, the hyphen is used in some compounds: see -.

Slash

The spacing of the slash depends on the items being separated. If they contain spaces, a space is written on both sides of the slash, or otherwise no spaces are written.

Apostrophe

For uses of the apostrophe in Finnish, see the entry for the apostrophe. The apostrophe is properly encoded as ’ (U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK) (the same character is used for single quotation marks as described below), but ' (U+0027 APOSTROPHE) is widely used in computing.

Quotation marks

In modern Finnish, two sets of quotation marks are used: double quotation marks (”...”) and single quotation marks (’...’). The double quotation marks are the default quotation marks, while the single quotation marks are used for glosses or explanations of words, or for quotations nested inside double quotation marks. A single quotation mark is ’ (U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK) and a double quotation mark is ” (U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK) (often in computing replaced by ASCII ' (U+0027 APOSTROPHE) and " (U+0022 QUOTATION MARK) respectively for technical reasons). The same character is used both to begin and end a quote.

The guillemets can also be used for quotations or passages of speech, but they are somewhat old-fashioned. In Finnish, the right-pointing variant is used both at the beginning and end of the quote (»...»: » (U+00BB RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK)).

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