This page contains all kinds of different Finnish abbreviations, all thrown together into one big table. Some of them are specific to university vocabulary and thesis writing, others have to do with cooking, and then there are some that are just part of everyday life.

The point of this page is not to give you a list of abbreviations to learn by heart. Rather, you can come back to this page to look up what a certain abbreviation means when you come across it while reading Finnish.

1. Random Abbreviations

2. Food Related Abbreviations

3. Abbreviations of Units of Measurement

4. Abbreviations Related to Time

5. School Related Abbreviations

6. People Related Abbreviations

7. Abbreviations for Organizations

Below, you can find some abbreviations for important organizations and institutions and such. We could add lots of local organizations to this list, but these are just a couple of examples.

8. Abbreviations in Sentences and Clauses

There is a fairly large amount of abbreviations that express the relations between words and sentences, similar to conjunctions. The phrases make most sense when you see them in an actual sentence, so I’m considering writing a separate article about them.

In the table below I’ve occasionally added “x” to the abbreviation or the translation. This is a placeholder for any word. I’ve included it in those cases where the phrase seemed more understandable with this addition.

9. Pronunciation of Abbreviations

In addition to knowing what Finnish abbreviations mean, it’s also important to know how to pronounce them. When reading a sentence with an abbreviation out loud, there are several methods in use. Let’s take the abbreviation Eta “Euroopan talousalue” as an example:

1. We can read it as a word, so literally “eta“.
2. We can read it letter per letter, so “ee-tee-aa“.
3. We can read it as if it wasn’t abbreviated, so “Euroopan talousalue“

For many words, only one of these three options is used. Knowing which one can be difficult because this can differ based on the abbreviation without many clear rules.

9.1. Examples of abbreviations you will read as if the whole word was written

9.2. Examples of abbreviations you will read as if they were the actual word

9.3. Examples of abbreviations you will read one letter at a time

Please realize that you should be using the Finnish pronunciation of the letters here. For exampl, L, M and N are äl, äm and än. This also counts for vowels! When it says in the table below “tee-vee” this is not  the English pronuncation “tii-vii”.

10. Problems Related to Abbreviations

There are two questions that are very common related to abbreviations:

1. Should you use capital letters or small letters?
2. Should you include a dot or not?

This is something Finns struggle with as well. This is first taught to Finns in high school, and then repeated during further education. It’s a good idea to look these up online when you’re using them. There are some rules, but I find they have so many exceptions that there is little point in listing them here.

Another issue is the fact that Finnish has cases. You might understand m means “meter/metre”, but in a text, you could come across the inflected forms m:nä, m:einä, m:jä. Those could be the topic of another article some day!

I have a separate article with lots of abbreviations regarding to housing adverts. You can also find a more extensive list on the website of Kotimaisten kielten keskus.

If you want to learn abbreviations related to your own profession or hobbies, you can do some Google searches to hopefully find a couple of good lists. A random search I did came up with:

Those are some of the most common Finnish abbreviations! I hope you found what you were looking for.

Related posts:

Communication – Finnish Vocabulary The Press – Finnish Vocabulary Supporting a Friend – Finnish Vocabulary Phrases Saying Thank You in Finnish – Kiitos avusta, Kiitti sulle, Kiitoksia kahvista