Helsinki slang: no sign in the city says Sörkka

There is no Sörkka in Helsinki. There is a district called Sörnäinen, a metro station with that name written across the front of it, and a tram stop, and a police station that gave the neighbourhood half its reputation. Plenty of people say Sörnäinen. Plenty of the same people say Sörkka in the next sentence.

The same holds for most of the inner city. You can have an address in one set of names and a conversation in another, and the second set is not written down anywhere you will walk past.

The names the map does not have

Terhi Ainiala, who studies Finnish place names at the Institute for the Languages of Finland, dates the oldest of these to the working-class districts of Helsinki at the end of the 1800s, and notes that a large share of the old slang names were built on the Swedish forms of the place.¹ That is the reason for the shape of the left-hand column. Sörkka is a Finnish mouth repeating Sörnäs at speed, and Rööperi is the same thing happening to Rödbergen.

Then the city’s language changed and the names changed with it.

1. 1
   1880s to the war: built on Swedish

   Helsinki's working districts were bilingual by necessity, and the slang was the shared ground. The names in this layer are Swedish street names worn down by Finnish speakers. All five in the top half of the table are still in daily use, which makes them the longest-lived slang in the country.
2. 2
   After the war: the same places, renamed from Finnish

   As the slang itself became more Finnish, Swedish-based names acquired Finnish-based partners. Bergga, from Berghäll, gained Kaltsi from Kallio; Drumssa, from Drumsö, gained Laru from Lauttasaari. The old ones did not die. They ran alongside, which is why Herttoniemi alone has been Herde, Hertsika, Herttika, Herttis and Hertsu.
3. 3
   From the 1950s: slang becomes youth language, and leaves Helsinki

   Ainiala records the shift precisely here. Slang stopped being a city's shared code and became a generation's, and slang place names started appearing all over Finland. The humour arrived with it: Kannelmäki as Käkimäki, Myllypuro as Pyllymuro, Nordenskiöldinkatu as Nordenskikkeli, and Hattulantie translated into Stetson Street.

The suffix machine, which is the useful part

Most slang names are not inventions. They are the official Finnish name with the end cut off and a slang ending stuck on, and once you can see the operation you can run it backwards on a name you have never heard.

The same endings do the same work on the ordinary nouns of Stadin slangi, which is why they feel familiar before anyone explains them: duunari is a worker, hevari is a metalhead, fillari is a bicycle. Ainiala notes that even in the newer slang the great majority of names are formed this way from the official ones, so the jokes are the exception and the machine is the rule.¹

Two syllables in, an ending on, done. If somebody says Mä asun Larussa and you have never heard of Laru, the operation you are looking for is the one that makes a place with four syllables into a word with two.

What the current layer sounds like

The centre of Helsinki slang is no longer Kallio. Heikki Paunonen, emeritus professor and the person who has collected school slang in Helsinki for more than forty years, names East Helsinki as the engine, for two reasons that sit on top of each other: it is the most multicultural part of the city, and from the 1960s onwards a great many people moved there from the old slang districts of Kallio, Vallila, Hermanni and Alppila, taking the vocabulary with them.²

His most recent large collection was made in early 2020 at three Helsinki schools. Just under a hundred young people returned close to a thousand words.

Paunonen points at the direction of travel as the new thing. Social media is written language, he says, and words are now moving from there into speech, where until recently the traffic went the other way.²

One word made the whole journey, and it shows what the layer does. Pöhinä meant amphetamine in East Helsinki drug circles in the 1990s. The rapper collective Notkea Rotta carried it into public use, and within a few years a Finnish prime minister was describing his own government as having hyvä pöhinä, a good buzz.²

The part that is not vocabulary at all

Ask Finns to describe how Helsinki sounds and they will not give you a word list. They will hiss at you.

The stadiässä, the Helsinki s, has been an object of national irritation for more than a century, and it has had a run of unkind names: the pop-star s, the pissis s, the gay s. Four researchers spent a peer-reviewed book on it.³

It nearly disappeared, and then it became fashionable. Johanna Vaattovaara traces the revival to 1950s popular song, and specifically to Laila Kinnunen, who had spent part of the war as an evacuated child in Sweden. Other singers copied the sound from her records: Virve Rosti has said in as many words that she copied the pop-star s. It became a marker of stardom, and later of Helsinki itself.⁴

The researchers’ least comfortable finding is about the listener. Many an s is simply heard as a Helsinki s once the speaker has been placed as a Helsinki person. Halonen puts the real load on the city rather than the sound: the burden is being from Helsinki, and the s is the thing an irritation can be hung on.⁴

The decoding order, if you are new here and trying to follow a conversation: names first, because they are stable and they are most of what you will miss. Take the first two syllables, look for the slang ending, and the official name is usually sitting underneath it.