Use of capital letters

Continental usage

In the use of capital vs. small letters, Finnish mostly follows the continental European tradition, as in e.g. Spanish and French, rather than English. This means that capital (uppercase) letters are used much less than in English.

Within a sentence or a heading or title, only the first word and proper nouns are capitalized. The same applies to entries in a command menu, for example (e.g. Avaa tiedosto, cf. English usage “Open File”).

Using all-caps

In older style, headings are often written in capital letters. This is now old-fashioned and advised against e.g. in the national standard for office documents.

In logos, short menu items, buttons, etc., it is common to use all capitals, but this is a design issue and not a language rule.

In contract texts, the English style of writing contract terms like CUSTOMER and PRODUCT in uppercase (or as capitalized, e.g. Customer) does not match Finnish tradition and rules. It is however nowadays often used due to requirements imposed by companies.

Capitalization of proper names

In Finnish, proper names are capitalized as in English, but the concept of proper name is partly different. Names assigned to individual persons, organizations, places and other geographic entities, or product brands are treated as proper names, e.g. Charles Darwin, Apple, Helsinki, Windows.

Derivations of proper nouns are written in lowercase, e.g. pariisilainen (Parisian) from Pariisi (Paris) and darwinismi or darvinismi from Darwin. However, if the derivation itself is a proper name e.g. as an epithet, it is capitalized, e.g. Vilhelm Occamilainen (William of Ockham).

Compounds with a proper name as a component have different spellings, e.g. ranskan­leipä (French white bread), from Ranska (France) and leipä (bread) but—in a more casual compound—Ranskan-matka (trip to France). Widely used compounds with specialized meaning are generally written in lowercase, whereas other compounds usually preserve the spelling of the proper name and have a hyphen between the parts.

Names of officials have varying spellings, and the standards for them have not been quite stable. By current rules, we write e.g. ulkoministeriö (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) but Viestintävirasto (Finnish Communications Regulations Authority). The reason is that the latter is a separate bureau. Since this looks unsystematic, people often capitalize the names of ministries, for example.

Names of companies and associations often have all their words capitalized, e.g. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. This helps in recognizing them as proper names, especially when the first word as such is a proper name. Although the official rules are not clear, it is usually best to use the same spelling as the organization itself.

Trademarks and company names should normally be capitalized, though this is debatable for names written differently by the companies themselves, e.g. iBook and airberlin.

Many names are protected as trademarks in Finland, even though they might be common names in other countries, e.g. Aspirin. Although forms like aspiriini are very often used as common names, such use is still less common than in US English, for example. The legal status of trademarks can be checked from the official trademark databases.

The following table shows, by examples, whether some names are capitalized or not in Finnish. Proper names of places, people, etc. have been omitted, since they seldom raise questions about capitalization.

Deviations from the standard spellings are common, e.g. Paavi, Talvisota, or (for ideological reasons) jumala.