Finnish swearing has a grammar slot of its own

In Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson reports that Finns, short of proper swear words, “rather oddly adopted the word ravintolassa.” That is the inessive case of the word for restaurant. Finland’s own foreign ministry has been correcting it on its website since 2009.¹

The word is wrong and the shape of the mistake is more interesting than the word. Bryson looked for Finnish swearing where an English speaker keeps theirs, in the vocabulary. The vocabulary is easy to find and we have written it down: perkele and vittu carry the definitions, the force and the situations to avoid. In Finnish a good deal of the swearing is in the grammar, though, and there is a two-word test that shows you where.

The test

Minna Hjort, then at Helsinki, put it in a 2007 paper about what the terminology should be. A swear word can stand in the genitive in front of a noun. One particular class of emotional word cannot, and the result there is not merely impolite. It is ungrammatical.²

The left column is ordinary irritated Finnish, roughly “what the hell is Idols”. The right one uses luoja, the Creator, and herra, the Lord. Both are perfectly good words for exasperation somewhere else in a sentence, and in that slot they produce nothing a Finn would say.

The line is not strength. Hitto is about as forceful as “damn” and it goes in without trouble, and so do hemmetti and perhana: hiton kylmä, hemmetin kallis, perhanan hidas. So the practical consequence runs the opposite way to the one most learners assume. To soften a phrase you keep the construction and swap in a weaker swear word. Rebuilding the sentence is not required, and reaching for luoja is not politeness, it is a grammatical error.

The slot itself is a general intensifier position rather than a swearing one. Mikä ihmeen Idols? - “what on earth” - is the commonest thing in it, and ihme is not a swear word at all. So the test runs in one direction only: a word that will not go in that slot is not swearing, whatever it sounds like in translation.

Hjort’s paper restores the distinction underneath, one that Finnish dictionaries had let collapse. Voimasana is the umbrella, covering anything used for emotional release. Under it sit kirosana, actual swearing, päivittelysana for the luoja and herra class, and the minced euphemisms. English has one bucket. Every English-language list of Finnish swear words pours all three into it, which is how hitto, luoja and vittu end up in one column with translations beside them and no indication that the grammar treats them as three different things.

One word, several shapes

These words inflect like everything else in Finnish. They take cases, they build verbs, they take derivational suffixes.

The force column below is our own judgement, not a measurement. The one published ranking, Hjort’s from 2014, puts vittu first in both of the two lists it produced, with saatana and perkele behind it. Everything finer than that ordering is a reader’s ear against ours. On the scale, 1 is something you could say to a colleague and 5 is the strongest thing available.

The productive slot is a modifier slot. Vitun kallis grades a price. Helvetisti lunta counts snow. The same slot takes a person perfectly well - vitun idiootti - and haista vittu is aimed at somebody and nothing else. But because the construction grades whatever follows it, a great deal of Finnish swearing lands on the situation rather than on anybody, which is one reason a Finnish building site can sound furious with nobody arguing.

The suffix means quantity. Vitusti is “a lot of” rather than “very”. Vitusti duunia is a workload; vitusti kylmä is not said, and vitun kylmä is. The one place the adverb does modify an adjective is a comparative - vitusti parempi, a lot better - which is still a quantity, of difference.

The derivation machinery keeps running, which is how the system stays visible. In May 2023 a fire chief described a flood on Yle’s main evening news as having perkelöitynyt - devil-ified, roughly “gone to hell”. The verb had been proposed to the Kielitoimiston sanakirja the year before and turned down as not yet established, though Kotus had first logged it in 2007. An emeritus professor of Finnish, asked about it, shrugged and pointed at the derivation system: everyone understands it, he said, even though the word has never existed.³

The mild ones are the ancient ones

English swearing faded downwards. “Damn” and “hell” were once serious and are now barely anything. Finnish did something stranger: the words that faded are the oldest ones in the language, and the word at the top of the scale is the most recent arrival.

Ulla-Maija Kulonen traced the pre-Christian layer for Kotus in 1990. Hiisi was a sacred place and then a forest spirit, and it is the root of hitto, hittolainen, himputti and hiiskatti. So painu hiiteen is a literal pagan curse that now sits at the strength of “get lost”. Lempo began as flame. Helvetti came through Swedish from a Germanic realm of the dead that predates the Christian one.⁴

Perkele is the clearest case. It is a Baltic loan of roughly two to three thousand years ago, related to Lithuanian perkūnas, thunder. Kulonen’s observation is the good one: by the regular sound laws the word should be perkuna in modern Finnish. It is not, because swear words undergo irregular development, and the irregularity is itself the evidence. The same process produced perhana and pirskatti, which are not euphemisms borrowed from elsewhere. They are the same word, worn into different shapes.

Meanwhile vittu was an ordinary rural term for the female genitals well into the 1800s, pushed out of print as a small educated class tightened the written language, and only spread through Finnish literature from the 1960s. By the 1990s young speakers were using it as a comma.⁵ Hjort’s corpus work makes it the relatively most common swear word in contemporary Finnish fiction, and perkele has gone the other way, weakening enough that it appears more often now than when it was strong enough to be printed as p-kele.⁶

So the two languages have arrived at a similar place from opposite ends. Both now put the anatomical layer above the religious one. Finnish got there recently and English got there centuries ago, which is why the Finnish word that looks archaic is mild and the one that looks crude is nuclear.

What a softened one sounds like

Most of what you will actually hear is not the strong word. It is one of these, and they are built by mechanism rather than by feel, so they are recognisable once you know the three shapes.

1. 1
   Same opening, harmless remainder

   perkele gives perhana and perkules. saatana gives saakeli. helvetti gives helkkari and hemmetti. vittu gives vitsi and vattu. These are the workhorses, and they are mild. All of them still take the genitive slot: helkkarin kylmä is a sentence.
2. 2
   Cut it short

   Voi vee. The letter stands in for the word and everybody knows which word. Harmless, and slightly comic.
3. 3
   Put anything at all in the voi frame

   Voi räkä. Hjort's own example of how far this goes is Voi jalka - oh leg - and the point is that the more arbitrary the word, the funnier it is. If you hear a Finn swear by a body part or a vegetable, this is what is happening.
4. 4
   One that reads mild in English and is not

   Jumalauta comes out in English as something like "God help", which sounds like a softener and is not one. It sits with perkele, vittu, saatana and helvetti. Two words in this list are also ordinary vocabulary, which is the joke: vitsi is the everyday word for a joke, and vattu is a western dialect word for a raspberry.

Reading down that list is more useful than memorising it. A Finn softening something is not reaching for a polite word, they are reaching for a word from the same box with less voltage in it - which is the genitive test again, seen from the other side.

What it sounds like when it is you

Finnish learners in a small Jyväskylä study reported that swearing in Finnish felt weaker to them than swearing in their own first language, while finding Finnish phonologically well suited to it. They also picked up vittu and perkele first, from people rather than from any course, and met the mild words late or never.⁷

The mirror is measurable in Finnish media. English swearing gets played on Finnish radio at a rate its Finnish equivalent never would, and a presenter using the Finnish word at the same frequency would be having a conversation with a producer.⁸ A foreign swear word is lighter to the person saying it and to the station playing it.

Your perkele is therefore weightless to you and fully audible to the room. The foreign ministry, of all publishers, puts it most directly: it is our F-word, and Finns would not enjoy hearing theirs used with the same lack of care.¹

So: before you use a word you heard, put it in the genitive in front of a noun and see whether it survives. If it does, it is in the strong pile, whatever it looked like in the subtitles. If the sentence collapses, you are holding one of the harmless ones, and you can say it in front of anybody.