According to a freshly-released list Finnish is among the group of languages the FSI considers to be the most difficult for English speakers to learn. Over the years language learning hobbyists have compiled numerous lists rating the world’s easiest — and most difficult – languages to learn.

Agricola’s writing system was based on Swedish, at the time the official language of Finland, as well as on German, and Latin. This writing system was revised over time. Present-day Finnish uses the Roman alphabet (suomen aakkoset), with the addition of the letters å, ä, ö which are listed at the end of the alphabet.

29 letters

, A native Finnish speaker. “Ä” is pronounced like the letter “a” in the word “plan”. “A” is pronounced like the letter “a” in the word “disarm”. “Ä” is pronounced a bit higher than just “a”.

The Finnish alphabet has two umlaut vowels: Ä (a-umlaut) and Ö (o-umlaut). Now let me make this completely and absolutely clear: The letter Ä is not the same as the letter A.

Finnish is written as it is spoken and you pronounce all the letters in every word. A doubled vowel is pronounced longer than a single vowel and a doubled consonant is held longer than a single consonant. Think of the word “hat” in English. The “a” sound (equivalent to the Finnish letter “ä”) is short.

Why does the Finnish language contain so many double letters? Doubling a letter is a simple way to diffeeentiate long sounds from short sounds. Because Finnish distinguishes between long and short phonems. One single letter means the phonem is short; two letters denote a long phonem.

Stress. Stress in Finnish is non-phonemic. Like Hungarian and Icelandic, Finnish always places the primary stress on the first syllable of a word.