--- title: "Helsinki slang: no sign in the city says Sörkka" description: "Three layers of Helsinki slang are still audible in the city: Swedish place names from the 1880s, Finnish replacements after the war, and Somali and Arabic since 2000." type: "article" category: "spoken-finnish" url: "https://finnishirl.com/blog/helsinki-slang" canonical: "https://finnishirl.com/blog/helsinki-slang" published: "2026-10-03" updated: "2026-10-03" author: "Andrey the Nomad" site: "Finnish IRL" license: "https://finnishirl.com/terms#ip" --- # Helsinki slang: no sign in the city says Sörkka URL: https://finnishirl.com/blog/helsinki-slang Date: 2026-10-03 Updated: 2026-10-03 Category: spoken-finnish Keywords: helsinki slang, stadin slangi, helsinki district nicknames, sorkka sornainen, finnish city slang, helsinki dialect Summary: Three layers of Helsinki slang are still audible in the city: Swedish place names from the 1880s, Finnish replacements after the war, and Somali and Arabic since 2000. Quick answer: - Helsinki slang is Stadin slangi, and the first part of it you meet is the place names: Sörkka for Sörnäinen, Hagis for Hakaniemi, Rööperi for Punavuori, Kaltsi for Kallio, Laru for Lauttasaari. - After the war a Finnish-based layer grew beside it, so Berghäll's Bergga acquired Kaltsi from Kallio, and Drumsö's Drumssa acquired Laru from Lauttasaari. - Newer names mostly come from one machine: take the first syllable or two of the official Finnish name and add a slang ending. Hiekkaharju becomes Hiekkis, Simonkallio becomes Simppari. - The current centre is East Helsinki, not Kallio. In a 2020 collection of youth slang, the loans arriving were Somali, Arabic, English and, for the first time, Japanese. What you'll learn: - Why a Helsinki address and a Helsinki conversation use different names for the same place - How to date a slang name by ear, and roughly to the decade - The suffix rule that lets you reverse a name you have never heard before - What the famous Helsinki s actually is, and why researchers say nobody can imitate it Body: 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. ![A grey February afternoon on Hämeentie in Sörnäinen, buses at the stop and the red M of a metro entrance behind](/images/words/optimized/blog-helsinki-slang-1-49c3ca7330-1080.webp "Sörnäinen, on the sign. Sörkka, in the conversation") ## The names the map does not have | said {fi} | on the sign {fi} | where the slang name came from | | --- | --- | --- | | Sörkka | Sörnäinen | Swedish Sörnäs | | Rööperi | Punavuori | Swedish Rödbergen | | Hagis | Hakaniemi | Swedish Hagnäs | | Skatta | Katajanokka | Swedish Skatudden | | Ogeli | Oulunkylä | Swedish Åggelby | | Kaltsi | Kallio | the Finnish name, post-war | | Laru | Lauttasaari | the Finnish name, post-war | | Mustis | Mustikkamaa | the Finnish name, suffixed | | Kontsa | Kontula | the Finnish name, suffixed | 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.[^ainiala] 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 illuminated neon sign of Hakaniemen Kauppahalli, white lettering under an orange and yellow motif](/images/words/optimized/blog-helsinki-slang-2-444c9b93d1-1080.webp "Hakaniemen Kauppahalli in neon. In speech the district is Hagis, from the Swedish Hagnäs")
## 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. | ending | example | official name | | --- | --- | --- | | -is | Hiekkis, Herttis, Mustis | Hiekkaharju, Herttoniemi, Mustikkamaa | | -ari | Simppari | Simonkallio | | -kka | Sörkka | Sörnäinen, via Swedish | | -u | Laru, Hertsu | Lauttasaari, Herttoniemi | The same endings do the same work on [the ordinary nouns of Stadin slangi](/finnish-slang#stadi), 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.[^ainiala] 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. ![Castréninkatu in Kallio on a summer day, a tall cream apartment block, two cyclists and a child on a scooter](/images/words/optimized/blog-helsinki-slang-3-d552dc2f51-1080.webp "Kallio, which the slang has called Bergga and Kaltsi about seventy years apart") ## 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.[^paunonen] 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. | word {fi} | what it is | | --- | --- | | wallah | Somali and Arabic, "I swear". Out of East Helsinki in the early 2000s and now heard across Finland | | nani | Japanese, from gaming. Roughly "seriously?", and the first Japanese word into the slang | | bro, bre | shortened from broidi, brother | | sys | shortened from systeri, sister | | tnää, hme, lpl | today, tomorrow, läpällä (as a joke). Written abbreviations that came back into speech | | käty | kämppä tyhjänä. The flat is empty, the parents are away | | käjä | kännijännä. The particular anticipation of a weekend that has drink in it | 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.[^paunonen]
Read the date on this table before you use it

That collection was made in early 2020. Youth slang has a short half-life, and several of these will already sound like something an older sibling says. The stable part is underneath: Paunonen counts about ten subject areas that slang words cluster into, and says they have not changed in over a hundred years.

The safe words are the old ones. Jätkä, kundi, äijä for a bloke, muija and gimma for a woman, jurrissa and fyllassa for drunk. Gimma's older sister bööna goes back to Stockholm slang of the 1800s and is still in circulation.

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.[^paunonen] ![The pedestrian street of Kontula shopping centre, a man riding a moped past a green shopfront](/images/words/optimized/blog-helsinki-slang-4-1839b0586e-1080.webp "Kontula shopping centre. The vocabulary is made out here now, not in Kallio") ## 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.[^kielikello]
What the researchers found

Mia Halonen, one of the book's authors, points out that Finnish has no standard s in the sense that saying it differently would change what a word means. Everybody recognises the Helsinki s; nobody can say what it is. Asked to imitate it, people exaggerate wildly.

The origin is a nineteenth-century argument. Helsinki was long Swedish-speaking and began turning Finnish from the late 1800s, and the new Finnish Theatre's actresses were native Swedish speakers. Reviews complained their s hissed too much and sounded un-Finnish, at exactly the moment when a pure Finnish language was a national project.

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.[^yle-assa] 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.[^yle-assa] 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. [^ainiala]: [Slanginimiä sadan vuoden ajalta](https://kotus.fi/kolumni/slanginimia-sadan-vuoden-ajalta/) - Terhi Ainiala, Institute for the Languages of Finland, 16 March 2015, drawing on her chapter in Helsinki kieliyhteisönä (2006) [^paunonen]: [Stadin slangiin tulee lainasanoja jo japanista asti](https://yle.fi/a/3-11667796) - Yle, 26 November 2020, interviewing Heikki Paunonen on a collection made at Helsingin Suomalainen Yhteiskoulu, Töölön yhteiskoulu and Stadin aikuis- ja ammattiopisto [^kielikello]: [Stadiässä - kokoaan suurempi äänne](https://www.kielikello.fi/-/stadi%C3%A4ss%C3%A4-kokoaan-suurempi-%C3%A4%C3%A4nne) - Kielikello, reviewing Stadin syntinen s by Mia Halonen, Heikki Paunonen, Johanna Vaattovaara and Samu Nyström. The review notes the book is peer-reviewed [^yle-assa]: ["Stadin syntinen s" ärsyttää jo ennen kuin puhuja avaa suunsa](https://yle.fi/a/3-11611877) - Yle, interviewing Mia Halonen and Johanna Vaattovaara FAQ: Q: Is Stadin slangi a dialect? A: Not in the sense that Savo or Tampere Finnish are. The grammar underneath is ordinary Finnish and the vocabulary is what varies, which is what makes it slang rather than a dialect. It is also urban and socially marked in a way a regional dialect is not. Q: Will people in Helsinki understand me if I use old slang words? A: Yes, and they will place you. Words like spora and snaijata are understood by everyone and are marked by generation, so a foreigner using them sounds like somebody who studied Helsinki from a novel. Q: Is Helsinki slang still alive or is it a museum piece? A: Both, in different layers. The place names are in daily use and have been for a century. The youth vocabulary turns over fast enough that a collection made in 2020 is already partly historical. Q: What is the difference between Stadi and Hesa? A: Both mean Helsinki. Stadi is what the city calls itself; Hesa is what the rest of the country calls it, and using Hesa in Helsinki tends to get you gently corrected. Q: Why does so much old Helsinki slang look Swedish? A: Because the city was, and the slang grew in districts where Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking workers lived on the same stairwells. Names like Rööperi and Skatta are Finnish mouths repeating Swedish street names. Q: Do Helsinki teenagers know they are speaking slang? A: Often not. Heikki Paunonen, who has collected school slang for over forty years, says young speakers tend to think of slang as something their parents or grandparents know, while people in their seventies think what teenagers speak is not proper slang. Q: Is there a dictionary of Helsinki slang? A: Yes. Heikki and Marjatta Paunonen's Stadin slangin suursanakirja, published in 2000, covers the 1880s to the early 2000s and won the Tieto-Finlandia prize the following year. It is the source behind almost everything written on the subject. Q: Does slang from Helsinki spread to the rest of Finland? A: Some of it does and loses its origin on the way. Duuni is used everywhere and nobody hears Helsinki in it. Wallah spread out of East Helsinki in the same way within about two decades. Sources: - Slanginimiä sadan vuoden ajalta: https://kotus.fi/kolumni/slanginimia-sadan-vuoden-ajalta/ - Stadin slangiin tulee lainasanoja jo japanista asti: https://yle.fi/a/3-11667796 - "Stadin syntinen s" ärsyttää jo ennen kuin puhuja avaa suunsa: https://yle.fi/a/3-11611877 - Stadiässä - kokoaan suurempi äänne: https://www.kielikello.fi/-/stadi%C3%A4ss%C3%A4-kokoaan-suurempi-%C3%A4%C3%A4nne - Tsennaaks Stadii, bonjaaks slangii: Stadin slangin suursanakirja: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/fi/publications/tsennaaks-stadii-bonjaaks-slangii-stadin-slangin-suursanakirja/ - Stadin Slangi ry: Historia: https://stadinslangi.fi/?page_id=24 - Kielitoimiston sanakirja: slangi: https://www.kielitoimistonsanakirja.fi/#/slangi Related words: stadi, duuni, fillari, ratikka, torilla-tavataan, fiilis