About 20% of Finnish vocabulary is estimated to be of foreign origin. This article deals with the origins of Finnish ATA loanverbs from English, their possibly different routes into Finnish and how they are dealt with in the Finnish language. Using the ending -ata has become a common way to adopt words from English into Finnish (e.g. googlata, tekstata, twiitata).

Those examples are the most recent “wave” of new words, but there are older words ending in -ata as well. The etymology of these verbs is not always clear. As such, some loanverbs from English added on this page might actually have taken a detour via Swedish or German.

1. Which verbs are included in this list?

For this article, I have searched for *ata in Kielitoimiston sanakirja. By putting an asterisk in front of the search word, you tell the dictionary to return all words that end in the letters after the asterisk.

Many of the verbs in my list are considered colloquial, dialect or slang words. My list is far from exhaustive; you could certainly think up many more slang words to add to this list. I’ve limited my scope to only those verbs that can be found in the dictionary I used. You can find many more examples from Finnish slang in Urbaani Sanakirja.

Included in this list are verbs that are pretty similar to English. I’m NOT calling them “English loanverbs“, as this can be extremely inaccurate. Languages borrow from each other constantly and we can’t follow the path of a word from one language to another.

In this article, I’m looking at verbs that look as though they have been adopted from English. For many of these, in addition to a direct adoption from English, we can often also consider an adoption from Swedish or German, which in turn have adopted the verb from English.

The idea of this article is to look at verbs that will be easy to recognize to English speakers. I do realize that some of these do etymologically fit better on my page about Swedish loanverbs, but I’m using English as a comparison.

2. Information presented in the table

In the table below, you can find the basic form of the verb (e.g. blogata), the English verb (e.g. to blog) and a more common or alternative way to say the same thing in Finnish without using the loanword (e.g. kirjoittaa blogia).

I’ve also included the Swedish translation of the verb where it resembles the Finnish and English words. For these verbs, it is hard to say how the word came into the Finnish language. Some of these verbs are straight loanverbs from English, however some could also have come through Swedish first; it’s hard to be sure. In the table below, the Swedish verb will appear within brackets, accompanied by the abbreviation Sw.

The table also contains some consonants that are green and others that are purple. The green verbs have consonant gradation (e.g. blokata : minä blokkaan : sinä blokkasit). The purple verbs are verbs where you might expect consonant gradation, but there is none. (e.g. hennata : minä hennaan : sinä hennasit).

3. Finnish -ATA Loanverbs from English

4. The Semantics of -ATA Verbs Borrowed from English

4.1. The Age of Loanwords

Not all loanwords are the same age, so not all words were adopted into Finnish at the same time. The list above contains loanverbs that have been around for a while.

In contrast, the list below gives you some examples of loanverbs from English that haven’t made it into Kielitoimiston sanakirja yet because they’re too new. It’s likely that some of these will be added in the future, while others will just disappear from spoken language.

4.2. The History and Source of Loanverbs

As I’ve mentioned several times already, this page contains loanverbs that look like their English equivalent. Their history, however, can be more complicated. They could have been adopted through a different language; most likely through Swedish.

There are some indicators that might show that a verb has made it from English to Finnish through Swedish. While working on this article, it became clear quite quickly that consonant gradation could be such an indicator. Many of the English verbs that have a similar Swedish equivalent have a double consonant in them, which is reminiscent of the Finnish strong grade of consonant gradation. For example, “to blog” is “blogga” Swedish. In Finnish, the basic form of the verb will be blogata and the conjugated forms e.g. bloggaan and bloggasin.

4.3. The Meaning of Loanverbs

Sometimes the Finnish loanword has a slightly different meaning than the English word it’s been borrowed from. This is the case, for example, for the following verbs:

The verb spiikata comes from the English “to speak”, but its meaning has shifted to mean speaking to an audience via loudspeakers. As such, it is possible that this loanverb has been adopted into Finnish through the noun “speaker” rather than the verb “to speak”. It’s hard to know for sure.

The verb synkata has also evolved beyond the English “to sync”. In Finnish, the verb is also used to express that two people get along very well; they “just clicked” (Heillä synkkaa hyvin). We can also use it to say that, for example, the picture and the sound of a television don’t match up perfectly, which is more consistent with the English meaning.

5. The Phonology of -ATA Loanverbs from English

When adopting words from other languages, there is always the issue of certain sounds not existing in the target language. There are different that these words will be adjusted to fit the target language. Below you can find out more about how loanwords from English have been modified to fit the Finnish consonant and vowel system.

5.1. Foreign consonants

Some consonants (e.g. b, d, g) don’t occur naturally in native Finnish words. With loanwords from Swedish, there was a strong tendency to replace these consonants with more Finnish sounds. This is common because Swedish loanwords are usually older than those borrowed from English. Current Finnish is much more open to new sounds than Finnish was a hundred years ago. In particular, b and g often retain their foreign sound when adopted to Finnish through an English loanword.

5.2. Consonant Clusters

With Swedish loanverbs we saw that consonant clusters were often simplified (e.g. raahata from draga and kuurata from skura). For Swedish words, even double consonants such as sk, tr and fr were often reduced to a single consonant.

With English verbs, there are far fewer of these simplifications. Consonant clusters of two consonants are kept as they are. Triple consonant clusers are also often retained for verbs that seem to be borrowed from English.

5.3. Pronunciation of Vowels

Different languages have different types of vowels. The amount and frequency of vowels used also differs. This is already noticeable when taking English only: English pronunciation can differ a lot based on where it’s spoken (e.g. British vs. American English). Because of this, it’s impossible in this article to fully compare the English and the Finnish vowel systems. The English vowel system pictured below is for standard BBC English.

5.3.1. Finnish vowel pronunciation based on English pronunciation

When a word is borrowed from English, there are two possible ways to deal with vowel differences. First, we can retain the English vowel sound of the word and match the Finnish spelling with the pronounciation. In these cases, Finnish is also very sensitive to long vowel sounds and diphthongs (ei). One exception is the English /oʊ/ in “yoga” and “yodel”, which gets /oo/ instead in Finnish.

5.3.2. Finnish vowel pronunciation based on English spelling

Alternatively, we can adhere to the English spelling rather than the pronunciation. In these cases, the pronunciation of the Finnish word will generally match up with the spelling. Take for example the verbs “to dub” /dʌb/ and “to surf” /sɜːf/. These have been adopted into Finnish based on their spelling: dubata and surffata. Both of these verbs get the Finnish /u/ sound.

The same happens for English verbs that have an -a- in them. For example, the verbs “to scan” /skæn/ and “to start” /stɑːrt/ are adopted into Finnish based on their spelling: skannata and startata. Both of these verbs have a different sound for the -a- in English, but Finnish replaces that sound with the typical Finnish /ɑ/.

The most interesting of these by far is the vowel -y-. The verbs “to sync” /sɪŋk/ and “to psyche” /ˈsaɪk/ will have the typical /y/ sound in Finnish: synkata and psyykata. This amuses many people because, for example, the messaging software Skype is pronounced very differently from English, even though the spelling matches up perfectly.

5.3.3. Both spellings possible, one pronunciation

The system isn’t completely transparent or logical, with some words allowing for both spellings in Finnish. However, these words often only have one pronunciation, despite their spelling being less set in stone. I am marking the Finnish spelling that’s used for the pronunciation in purple.

5.4. Vowel Harmony

Generally, loanwords which are similar to English verbs will adhere to the general Finnish vowel harmony rules: the vowels a, o and u won’t appear in the same word as the vowels ä, ö and y.

The only exceptions to this seem to be verbs that have an -y- in the first syllable.

5.5. Consonant Gradation

I have a separate article all about verbtype 4 consonant gradation in general, which gives you a good basis to compare this section to!

In general, loanverbs that look like English do undergo consonant gradation. You will find the three most common consonant gradation changes: k > kk, p > pp and t > tt.

In addition to k, p and t, the consonants b and g will also be doubled for some of these loanverbs, as you can see from the table below. Notice how joogata “to practice yoga” doesn’t follow the same pattern. This is due to the fact that the -a- at the end of “yoga” appears in the English word as well.

5.6. No consonant gradation

Lack of consonant gradation can often be explained pretty well.

1. Verbs that would visually lose their likeness to the English word don’t undergo consonant gradation.
2. Double consonants won’t change (e.g. mm > mp, nn > nt). Sometimes doing so would create the same problem as #1, but it’s just not done in general.
3. Certain consonant combinations never have consonant gradation, even in words that aren’t loanwords: -sk-, -st-, -ks-, -sk- and -ft-.

Further reading about loanverbs from English

• Virittäjä: Miten uudet aa, ää -loppuiset supistumaverbit tulevat nykysuomeen?
• Yle oppiminen: Korona sai meidät tiimaamaan, wappaamaan ja hängäröimään

That’s all for these verbs that look like loanverbs from English! Hopefully, as an English speaker, you will have enjoyed reading about these!

Related posts:

Finnish -ATA Verbs Borrowed from Swedish Baltic and Germanic Loanwords in Finnish Etymology The Finnish Verbtypes Elefantti or Norsu? Loanwords vs Finnish Words