Finnish IRL

Finnish calls a tongue twister tongue gymnastics

Half the famous Finnish tongue twisters are not hard to pronounce at all. They are hard to parse, and the best-known printed set in the country is distributed for care homes.

The learning curve Published Updated 8 min read

Quick answer

  • The famous ones split into two kinds that have almost nothing in common. Some are hard to pronounce. Others are trivial to pronounce and impossible to parse, because the same few letters are doing four or five different jobs.
  • Finnish names it kielivoimistelu or kielijumppa, tongue gymnastics. Its neighbours all name an injury.
  • Kokko, kokoo kokoon koko kokko is the second kind. Kokko is a surname, kokoo is gather, kokoon is into one piece, koko is whole and kokko is a midsummer bonfire.
  • In Finland these are not a playground game. The best-known printed set is published by the Age Institute as an activity for care homes and for children visiting them.

What you'll learn

  • Which famous Finnish sentences are hard to say and which are hard to understand
  • The kokko exchange taken apart word by word, including the question clitic
  • Why a Finnish sentence can repeat one shape five times and still mean five things
  • What Finns actually do with these, and who prints them

English twists the tongue. Swedish wrenches it, in tungvrickare. German breaks it outright, in Zungenbrecher. Finnish calls the same thing kielivoimistelu or kielijumppa: tongue gymnastics, tongue gym.

Three neighbours name an injury and one names a workout. That is not a deep truth about the national character, but it does predict what the sentences are for, because a surprising number of the famous Finnish ones are not difficult to pronounce at all.

Two different games with one name

Take the two best-known sentences side by side.

The sentenceWhat it means
Vesihiisi sihisi hississäA water goblin hissed in the lift
Kokko, kokoo kokoon koko kokkoKokko, gather the whole bonfire together

Read them out. The first one fights back: ten syllables of alternating s and h with no other sibilant in the language to relieve them. The second one comes out of your mouth without resistance, and then sits there meaning nothing until somebody explains it.

They are not the same kind of object. One is an articulation problem and the other is a parsing problem, and only the first is a tongue twister in the sense English means.

The parsing kind is the kind that travels. It is the one that ends up in listicles about impossible languages, and it is also the one that teaches a learner the least, because nobody has ever had to disambiguate five identical-looking words in a real Finnish conversation.

A midsummer bonfire burning on a rocky shore at Suomenlinna with the sea behind it
Suomenlinna at midsummer. This is a kokko, and it is also what the man in the sentence is being told to buildPhoto: JIP / Wikimedia Commons

The kokko sentence, taken apart

The full exchange, as it is printed on the card:

  • - Kokko, kokoo kokoon koko kokko!
    Kokko, gather the whole bonfire together!
  • - Koko kokkoko?
    The whole bonfire?
  • - Koko kokko.
    The whole bonfire.

Five words and one grammatical ending, wearing two letters between them.

The wordWhat it is
Kokkoa surname, and in old poetry an eagle
kokoospoken imperative of koota, to gather. The written form is kokoa
kokoonthe illative of the noun koko, a size or an assembled whole, used adverbially: into one heap
kokowhole, entire
kokkoa midsummer bonfire
-kothe question clitic, stuck onto the end of whatever is being asked about

That last one is the piece an English reader has no slot for. Finnish does not have a word for asking a yes-or-no question; it has an ending, and the ending attaches to whatever the question is really about. Usually that is the verb, which moves to the front to take it. When something else is in focus, the ending goes there instead.1 Koko kokkoko? is not “is it the whole bonfire” with the words rearranged. It is one syllable glued to kokko, and it puts the question precisely on the wholeness.

There is also a live Finnish lesson hiding in the first line. The imperative of koota is kokoa in written Finnish and kokoo in spoken, which is the same -oa reduction that turns sanoa into sanoo and taloa into taloo. The card prints the spoken form, not the written one.

Finland liked this exchange enough to put it on a state emoji. When the Ministry for Foreign Affairs published its set of national emojis, :kokko: is captioned with a shorter version of the same exchange and glossed, straight-faced, as “the feeling of being on fire”.2

Who actually prints these

The best-known printed set in Finland is not a children’s book. It comes from Vahvike, the activity library run by Ikäinstituutti, the Age Institute, and it is eight pages of print-and-laminate cards.3

Its own instructions:

What the cards tell you to do

Choose the easier and shorter sentences first. Read it slowly the first time and then speed up. How many times can you get through the card without a mistake? An hourglass gives everybody the same amount of time. A leader can read it first and the others repeat what they heard.

The set says it works as a competition between generations and as programme for children's visits to a care home.

So the audience is a room with a ninety-year-old and a seven-year-old in it, and the game is scored. That is a specific and slightly unexpected place for a national inventory of hard sentences to live, and it explains why the set is so long: it needs an easy end.

Sorting the cards by what actually makes each one hard gives roughly three groups, and the biggest is the one nobody outside Finland quotes.

  1. 1
    Hard to say
    Twenty-three of the thirty-eight cards. Appilan pappilan apupapin papupata pankolla kiehuu ja kuohuu. Pukki puski pässiä, pässi puski pukkia. Kurki kurkki kurkkupurkkiin. Lyyrinen laulurooli laululeirillä. Kun rämäpää määrää määränpään, on päämääränä rämäpään määräämä määränpää. These drill the one contrast that changes Finnish words, which is length.
  2. 2
    Hard to follow
    Thirteen. Keksijä Keksi keksi keksin. Onkiva rovasti, joka onki varovasti, on kiva rovasti. Talo palo, sano Tauno Palo, kun Tauno Palon talo palo. Nothing here is difficult to pronounce. The difficulty is entirely in working out which word is which.
  3. 3
    Hard to finish
    Two cards, and a different trick altogether: single words long enough to need a run-up. That game has its own rules and its own record holders.

Why the first group works on Finnish specifically

Appilan pappilan apupapin papupata is not hard because of the p. It is hard because it keeps switching between one p and two, and in Finnish that is not emphasis. It is a different word.

Say the beanpot sentence too fast and you do not slur it. You produce a different sentence, correctly pronounced, that happens to be nonsense, because length is the one contrast that changes a Finnish word. English speakers rarely feel this as a risk, since doubling a consonant in English changes almost nothing.

This is where a Finnish tongue twister stops being a party trick, and it is why the set is in speech-practice material at all. The Turku comparison project uses the same shape in its exercise packets.4 The oldest-sounding card in the whole Vahvike set is there for the same reason: ärrän kierrän ympäri orren, ässän pistän taskuun, which is an r and an s drill with a rhyme wrapped round it.3

A midsummer bonfire on the river at Imatra, reflected in the water, with autumn-coloured trees on the far bank
The same word, a different kokko. Imatra builds one on the Vuoksi where the whole town can see it from the bankPhoto: MKFI / Wikimedia Commons

The five to actually try

Ordered by how much they will teach you rather than by difficulty.

Say thisIt means
Vesihiisi sihisi hississäA water goblin hissed in the lift
Kurki kurkki kurkkupurkkiinA crane peeked into a cucumber jar
Mustan kissan paksut posketThe black cat’s fat cheeks
Appilan pappilan apupapin papupataThe curate’s beanpot at the in-laws’ parsonage
Keksijä Keksi keksi keksinInventor Keksi invented a biscuit

One sentence to keep for the moment somebody asks you to do the fourth one twice: en ymmärrä, the ordinary, unembarrassed way to say you did not follow. For the sentences you heard perfectly well and still cannot answer, en tiiä.

Footnotes

  1. Iso suomen kielioppi § 888: Kysymyslauseen ominaisuuksia - Kotimaisten kielten keskus ↩

  2. Kokko - thisisFINLAND, Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland ↩

  3. Kielijumppaa - Vahvike, Ikäinstituutti ↩

  4. KiVe-harjoituspaketti: Papukaija - KieliVertailu, University of Turku ↩

en ymmärrä - a young man on a Finnish station platform holding up a hand to an older man talking fast at him
en ymmärrä Say this and the conversation switches to English. Have the next sentence ready
punanen - a man holding up a red jumper and a grey one in a Finnish shop, telling the friend beside him which he means, snow through the window
punanen written punainen The national dream is a punainen tupa, and nobody pronounces the i
oon - a young woman on the phone in an office kitchen doorway saying where she is, coffee cup already in hand, melting snow on the ledge outside
oon written olen Someone rings to say where they are. This is the word you will miss
en tiiä - an older man on a Finnish park bench shrugging at a question with both hands on his walking stick, yellow leaves around him
en tiiä written en tiedä The most useful thing you can say badly

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Questions people ask

What is the hardest Finnish tongue twister?

For a non-native, almost certainly Appilan pappilan apupapin papupata pankolla kiehuu ja kuohuu. It is eight words built on the same two consonants, and the p and the pp have to stay different lengths or it stops being Finnish.

What does kokko kokoo kokoon koko kokko mean?

Kokko, gather the whole bonfire together. It is an instruction to a man called Kokko to build a midsummer bonfire, which is also called a kokko.

Why is koko in the sentence uninflected?

Because there are two of them. The koko meaning whole or entire does not inflect at all, while the koko meaning a size or an assembled whole is an ordinary noun and supplies kokoon.

Does Finnish actually have a word for tongue twister?

It has several and none of them is a loan translation. Kielivoimistelu and kielijumppa are the ones on printed material, and kielisolmu, a tongue knot, is used for the sentence itself.

Are these useful for learning Finnish?

For hearing Finnish, yes. For producing it, less than it looks: [the training studies](/blog/finnish-pronunciation-length) find identification improves over a few weeks and production does not follow. The cards make you notice the length contrast rather than install it, and noticing is the half a listener needs.

Where can I get the cards?

Vahvike publishes the set as a free PDF, eight pages meant to be printed, laminated and cut up. It is the Age Institute's activity library and the whole site is open.

Do Finnish children learn these at school?

Some, and they were used for speech practice long before speech therapists existed. The modern printed sets are aimed at least as much at adults, and the Age Institute distributes them for care-home groups.

What is the longest word on the cards?

Two of the thirty-eight cards are a single word rather than a sentence, and both are demonstration words rather than anything anybody says. That is [a different Finnish party trick](/blog/longest-finnish-words) with its own record holders.