When you start learning Finnish, you will have difficulties with the vocabulary, since few of the common words look familiar at all. After learning a basic vocabulary, things get easier, partly because you will learn new words that are derivations or compounds of words that you already know.
Although the core vocabulary is very different from English, there are many recognizable words in the somewhat less frequent words, such as prosentti (per cent), sama (same), and viikko (week). You can guess the meaning of these words on the basis of English, because the words are ultimately of the same origin. The word sama comes from some Germanic language form and is thus a relative of the English “same”. The word viikko is a similar case. These loanwords have been phonetically fully adapted to Finnish, and they are used just like originally Finnish words. The word prosentti is a different case. It comes from Swedish procent, and it is an international word. It is a relatively new loanword in Finnish and has not been fully adapted: it has the initial consonant cluster pr, which never appears in originally Finnish words. A more adapted form rosentti appears, too, but it is regarded as substandard.
Some loanwords can be difficult to recognize due to the conservative nature of Finnish. When there has been no phonetic reason to simplify a word, Finnish has often preserved a word in a rather original form. For example, Finnish kuningas is very close to the reconstructed proto-Germanic form “kuningaz” that was once adopted into Finnish, whereas in English it has been shortened to “king”, in German to “König”, and (as a loanword) in Russian to “knyaz”.
New loanwords may contain sounds and combinations of sounds that do not otherwise appear in Finnish. However, they have normally been adapted to the writing system and to the inflection system.
“Foreign word” is not an exact concept but refers to a word taken from another language and preserved in its original spelling and pronunciation, in principle. This includes foreign names, with the exclusion of a small set of old names that have been adapted to Finnish, such as Lontoo (London) and Pariisi (Paris). Names like Oxford or Bordeaux are treated as foreign names in Finnish.
Foreign words other than proper names are typically learned words or otherwise in special usage, such as chanson, status quo, and bridge (the card game), and they are often used as such in many languages.
In practice, even foreign words are often adapted to Finnish phonetics to some extent. Thus, bridge is typically pronounced as if it were written pridse or bridse. Foreign names are adapted, too. This is described in some detail in section Foreign names in Finnish.
There are also foreign words that have been partly adapted to Finnish, so that some part of the the original spelling has been preserved, such as watti (watt), pronounced [vatti].
Foreign words are inflected as required by their role in a sentence. The inflection is mostly much simpler than inflection of Finnish words in general, but it has some specialties.
Case inflection of foreign words is discussed in a separate section.
Verbs are always adapted to Finnish instead of using them as foreign words, typically using the AtA suffix, e.g. trimmata (to trim). This applies even when foreign spelling is retained, e.g. sprayata : sprayaan (to spray).
In old loanwords, the following changes have taken place when a foreign word has been adapted into Finnish.
In new loanwords, adaptation is much more limited, usually restricted to spelling adaptation, changes in the ending of the word as described in subsection Endings of international words, and appending an i after a final consonant. However, in colloquial use, even new loanwords may be adapted more strongly, perhaps jocularly, e.g. filosofi → vilosohvi.
Most loanwords are nouns. For verbs, Finnish has a few adaptation methods, but only two of them are productive:
From a practical point of view, especially as regards to writing rules, words of foreign origin in Finnish can be classified as follows:
Most of the problems in writing and pronouncing words of foreign origin are related to new loanwords, discussed in the next section.
The borders between the classes are not exact. Many loanwords that are rather new, such as netti (net, Internet) behave like old loanwords. There are intermediate forms between new loanwords and foreign words, i.e. words that have partly been adapted, partly retained foreign spelling, e.g. zeoliitti [tseoliitti](zeolith), which has kept the foreign z but has the ending adapted to Finnish.