This section deals with punctuation marks in a strict sense. The hyphen (-) and the apostrophe (’) were discussed in section Non-alphabetic characters in words. However, as a character, the apostrophe is identical with the single quotation mark used in Finnish, as described below.
The “big” punctuation marks are the period “.”, the exclamation mark “!”, and the question mark “?”. They are used at the end of a sentence. Their use does not differ from English usage.
The use of the comma is grammatical rather than pause-based in Finnish. This means that a comma separates clauses of a sentence or other structural parts. It does not always indicate a pause, and often a pause is not expressed with a comma. Consider the following sentences:
He said that the man who bought the house was his friend.
Hän sanoi, että mies, joka osti talon, oli hänen ystävänsä.
In the Finnish version, a comma separates the subsidiary clause from the main clause, and commas are also used around the relative clause joka osti talon (who bought the house) embedded in another clause.
In fiction prose, commas are very often omitted even when required by the grammar, since many authors and translators prefer such style.
The rules for using the comma, pilkkusäännöt, are complicated, and only experienced authors master them in all detail. However, the basic rules are relatively simple:
The en dash “–” is used much like in British English – like this. In older usage, the em dash “—” was commonly used, but the same way as the en dash now, with spaces around—unlike in US usage of the em dash.
The en dash, without spaces, is also used in range notations and similar constructs like 10–20 (from 10 to 20), as in English. However, spaces as used around the en dash when at least one of the connected expressions consists of two or more words, e.g. Namika Lahti –Tampereen Pyrintö 77–63, a sports event result where each team name has two word.
Two consecutive dashes, with spaces between and around (“ – – ”) indicated omission in quoted text, though nowadays the ellipsis “…” is often used for the purpose, as in English.
It is very common (as in English) to use the hyphen “-” instead of the en dash “–”. In situations where the en dash cannot be used, the recommendation is to use a hyphen with always spaces around, even in range notations, e.g. 10 - 20.
In standard usage, the ellipsis “…” indicates omission of some kind, but not omission in quoted text. For example, in a dialogue, Annas kun mietin… (Let me think…) indicates that the speaker ends a sentence without completing it; this often reflects a certain intonation.
The ellipsis is also used in range notations like 5…10.
Typographic rules for the ellipsis vary by language: some languages, like English, favor spaced dots, whereas others use unspaced dots, which are rather close to each other . At the level of characters, these can be interpreted as the use of the horizontal ellipsis character (U+2026) versus three normal periods “.” (full stop, U+002E). Finnish language rules do not explicitly deal with the issue, but they can be read as preferring the use of horizonal ellipsis character (…), with three uns In older written language, three spaced dots ( . . . ) were often used.
The quotation marks are symmetric, i.e. the same character is used at the start as at the end. The normal quotation mark is the same as American English closing quotation mark. Compare:
Hän sanoi: ”Tulen huomenna.”
He said: “I’ll come tomorrow.”
American English quotation marks often appear in Finnish texts. This is unintentional and caused by using Microsoft Word without due consideration of language settings. When document language is set to English (as it often is by default), Word turns an input of "abc" (with upright quotation marks) to “abc”; with proper Finnish settings, it is turned to ”abc”.
Alternatively, we can use double angle quotation mark, also known as guillemets. The same, right-pointing mark is used at the start and at the end. This usage is common in printed matter, especially in fiction prose, but rare otherwise.
Hän sanoi: »Tulen huomenna.»
When text inside quotation marks ends with a punctuation mark, as in the examples above, the punctuation mark is alwys considered as part of the quoted expression.
When a word is put in quotation marks, the marks enclose the entire word, including any suffixes. Similarly, when a word is set in italic, the suffix is in italic, too. Deviations from these principles are not uncommon, but they are substandard.
He puhuivat ”taalasta”. (They talked about “taala”.)
He puhuivat taalasta.
As the examples show, the use of quotation marks in conjunction with other punctuation is logical rather than typographic in Finnish. In English, a punctuation mark is often placed before the closing punctuation mark for better appearance, as in the following: They talked about “taala.” This is not accepted in Finnish when the punctuation is not part of the quoted text.
Single quotation marks are symmetric, too, e.g. ’hei’. The character used is the same as the English closing single quotation mark. It is identical with the apostrophe. Single quotation marks are very often used instead normal quotation marks, perhaps because on a Finnish keyboard, they can be typed with a single keypress, whereas double quotes require the Shift key. However, according to the rules of standard Finnish, single quotation marks should be used only
Examples of nested quotations in Finnish and in American English:
Leena kysyi: ”Sanoiko hän ’Tulen huomenna’?”
Leena asked: “Did he say ‘I’ll come tomorrow’?”
Example of using quotation marks for a word and its meaning:
Vanhan arkikielen sana ”taala” ’dollari’ on peräisin amerikansuomesta.
The example says that the old colloquial word taala, which means “dollar”, comes from American Finnish. It could alternative be written using italic instead of normal quotation marks:
Vanhan arkikielen sana taala ’dollari’ on peräisin amerikansuomesta.