Typing Finnish

The information in this section is intended for anyone who types Finnish words on a computer, possibly with no prior knowledge about the Finnish language. The information mainly relates to Microsoft Windows; other systems have very varying tools for input. On Android devices,

Keyboards

Most keyboards used in Finland are Finnish–Swedish keyboards. The main difference from US or UK keyboards is the presence of keys for the letters Å, Ä, and Ö. There is a national standard on keyboards, from year 2008, which can be characterized as Finnish multilingual keyboard layout. It can be used on old Finnish–Swedish keyboards, too, and it supports typing most European languages in a natural way, including the letters š and ž, and also direct typing of proper punctuation marks, like “smart quotes” and the en dash (–).

If you need to type Finnish on a normal US keyboard, using Windows, there are a few alternatives:

• Enable the US-International keyboard layout, which is available as pre-installed. Using it, AltGr Q produces ä and AltGr P produces ö. Here “AltGr” denotes the Alt key to the right of the space bar.
• Enable the Finnish keyboard layout. You can then use the apostrophe (') key to produce “ä” and the semicolon (;) key to produce “ö”. There are also other differences between the physical keyboard and the settings in this case, so this is not par­tic­u­lar­ly convenient.

You can also design your own keyboard layout and implement it using the free program Microsoft Keyboard Layout Generator, MSKLC. It takes perhaps 15 minutes to learn to use it and then a couple of minutes to implement a variant of any keyboard layout with some keys assigned to “ä” and “ö”, for example.

Alt codes

For casual use, such as typing just one Finnish name, you may find it simpler to use the Alt codes (on Windows): ä = Alt 0228, ö = Alt 0246, Ä = Alt 0196, Ö = Alt 0214. Use the left Alt key together with keys in the numeric keypad.

Special codes in Word

In Micorsoft Word, you can alternatively type Ctrl : (press the colon key while keeping the Ctrl key down) followed by typing “a” and “o” to get “ä” and “ö”, respectively. This is clumsy but probably easy to remember, since it means that Ctrl : adds two dots on the next letter.

The importance of language settings

When using a word processor, make sure the language is set to Finnish when typing Finnish text. This is essential for having spelling checks made properly if possible, but also for quotation marks. E.g., in Microsoft Word, when the language is set to Finnish and you type "hei" using the normal way to type the quotation marks, Word automatically converts the quotation marks as required by Finnish rules: ”hei”. If the language were set to English, you would get “hei”, with the opening quote as different from the closing one. .