Finnish IRL

Perkele only ranks tenth

Counted across 412 million words of Finnish dialogue, the swear word the rest of the world knows comes tenth. Finland's own harm criteria never mention swearing.

Finland, explained Published Updated 8 min read

Quick answer

  • Strong, but not the strongest, and far from the commonest. It sits in the group of five words almost every Finn recognises as swearing, and in running dialogue it is out-counted by helvetti, paska, vittu and hitto by seven to nine times over.
  • Finland's film and television classifiers do not treat swearing as harmful content at all. The statutory categories are violence, sex, anxiety and intoxicants, and fifteen pages of official criteria never mention it.
  • The same word behaves differently under the European games system. PEGI carries Bad language as its own content descriptor, where mild swearing points at a 12 rating and strong language at 16.
  • What makes perkele feel heavier than its frequency is age and theatre. It is a Baltic loan roughly two to three thousand years old, it named a thunder god before it named a devil, and it arrives as an oath instead of a crudity.

What you'll learn

  • What Finland's own harm criteria count, and the one place language appears in them
  • Where perkele actually sits when you count swear words in 412 million words of dialogue
  • Why counting subtitle dialogue undercounts this particular word, and why that undercount is itself the answer
  • The route from a Lithuanian thunder god to a word on a souvenir mug

Finland has a written definition of what is bad for a child to watch. It runs to fifteen pages, it has the force of law behind it, and it sorts everything a classifier might object to into four categories: väkivalta, seksi, ahdistus, päihteet. Violence, sex, anxiety, intoxicants.12

Swearing is not in it. The word kiroilu does not appear in the document at all.

The Orion cinema on Eerikinkatu in Helsinki, its lit sign above the entrance
Every age limit posted here was set without anyone counting the swear wordsPhoto: Sakari Kiuru / Wikimedia Commons

Where it actually ranks

That is one measurement of how rude a word is. Here is the other, and it disagrees with the reputation just as sharply.

Counting swear words across 412 million words of Finnish dialogue puts perkele tenth.3

WordTimes it appearsAgainst perkele
WordhelvettiTimes it appears197,114Against perkele9.4x
WordpaskaTimes it appears170,080Against perkele8.1x
WordvittuTimes it appears160,369Against perkele7.6x
WordhittoTimes it appears149,697Against perkele7.1x
WordhemmettiTimes it appears44,804Against perkele2.1x
WordsaatanaTimes it appears43,165Against perkele2.1x
WordjestasTimes it appears32,072Against perkele1.5x
WordpiruTimes it appears31,894Against perkele1.5x
WordjumalautaTimes it appears24,937Against perkele1.2x
WordperkeleTimes it appears21,031Against perkele
WordperhanaTimes it appears12,246Against perkele0.6x

Each row sums a fixed set of inflected forms, so every number is a floor and the close pairs in the middle could swap. Two rows also need reading against the corpus rather than off it. Vittu is undercounted hardest of all: it is the commonest swear word in spoken Finnish by a distance and the only one of these that works as ordinary filler, but a subtitler rendering an English expletive reaches for helvetti, hitto or paska far more readily. Jestas is the opposite artefact, a subtitle word for “jeez” that is close to extinct in speech.

What the table does show reliably is the thing it was built to test. Perkele is nowhere near the top, and hitto, roughly the strength of “damn”, outnumbers it seven to one.

The rulebook says the same thing twice over

The age limits come from the Act on Audiovisual Programmes, and the classifiers work from a criteria document grading the four categories across five age levels.4 Language surfaces once in it, inside the sex category, and only as very obscene language combined with audible ardour. So a Finnish film can carry perkele in every second line and be rated for seven-year-olds.

Put the same word in a video game and it changes. Finland uses the pan-European PEGI system for those, and PEGI carries Bad language as a named descriptor with its own icon: mild swearing points at 12, strong language at 16, and at PEGI 3 none of it should be audible.5 Same country, same word, and the Finnish rulebook is the relaxed one.

The undercount is the finding

One honest problem with that table. The corpus is subtitle dialogue, which means it is largely translated Finnish, and translators avoid perkele on purpose. It reads as too specifically Finnish for a character standing in a Los Angeles parking lot. The word scores much higher in fiction originally written in Finnish than in fiction translated into it.

That is not a flaw in the count. It is the clearest evidence available for what the word carries.

Read the gap, not the rank

Helvetti and hitto can stand in for an English swear word without anybody noticing. Perkele cannot, because it drags a nationality in with it. A Finnish translator reaching past it thousands of times over is telling you the word is marked before it is strong.

Which is also why it is the one that got out. The quality that makes it useless in a dubbed thriller is the quality that puts it on a mug.

A queue down Nordenskiöldinkatu in Helsinki for a heavy metal concert on a summer evening
The export route. Finnish metal did more for this word abroad than any Finn did at homePhoto: JIP / Wikimedia Commons

It was a thunder god first

The age is the other half of why the word feels heavier than its frequency.

Mikael Agricola put perkele into written Finnish in the sixteenth century, in its Christian sense, as a name for the devil. The word was already old by then. It has relatives across the Finnic languages, which places it in Proto-Finnic: Karelian perkeleh means an evil spirit and is used as a swear word exactly as in Finnish, and the Estonian counterpart põrgu means hell.6

Further back it is a Baltic loan, from a stream of borrowings into Proto-Finnic dated roughly two to three thousand years ago. On the Baltic side the relatives are Lithuanian perkūnas and perkūnija, which mean thunder and a lightning strike on one hand and the god of thunder on the other, plus Latvian pērkons and Old Prussian percunis.6

  1. 1
    A thunder god, somewhere around 1000 BCE
    Borrowed into Proto-Finnic from Baltic, probably already carrying the force that makes a divine name usable as an oath. The irregular sound changes that produced perhana and the whole family of pe- substitutes started early, and irregular change of that kind is a swear word's fingerprint.
  2. 2
    A devil, from the 1540s
    Agricola needed a Finnish word for the adversary and took one that was to hand. The Christian sense is the newest layer on the word, not its origin.
  3. 3
    A national joke, from about the 1990s
    Metal lyrics, advertising, merchandise. Professor Reijo Heikkinen puts the word's age at over three thousand years and notes that the one Finns most dislike is not this one: vittu won a most-hated-word poll outright, for being everywhere.

Three thousand years is the reason it does not sound like paska. An oath and a crudity are different instruments, and this one is an oath.

A crowd filling the square around the Havis Amanda statue in Helsinki after an ice hockey final
Havis Amanda after the 2022 world championship. One of the few settings where the word is ambientPhoto: Ximonic (Simo Räsänen) / Wikimedia Commons
Puolipäivänkatu in Helsinki on a snowy January evening, streetlights and no people
The natural habitat. Said once, at nobody, and then the matter continuesPhoto: JIP / Wikimedia Commons

The practical answer

Strong enough that it does not belong at work, in a shop or at anybody’s family table. Not strong enough that hearing it in traffic means something has gone seriously wrong.

Three things change where it lands, and none of them is the word.

Who is saying it. A foreigner’s perkele reads as comic before it reads as rude, because the accent announces that the word was chosen. The word card sets out where that holds, and the short version is that a meeting is not one of those places.

Whether it is aimed. Finnish swearing mostly lands on the situation. The grammar makes that easy, and it is why a Finn swearing at a jammed door is not being aggressive at anyone.

How often. The first one is punctuation. The fourth is a personality.

There is a reason this is the Finnish word everyone abroad knows, and it is not that Finns say it most. It is that nobody else can say it for them. The marketing industry found the same thing in sisu, and got a decade of campaigns out of it.

Footnotes

  1. Luokittelukriteerit 2022 - National Audiovisual Institute. Fifteen pages grading violence, sex, anxiety and intoxicants across the 7, 12, 16 and 18 limits ↩

  2. Ikärajojen perusteet 2022 - National Audiovisual Institute. The research basis behind each of the four categories. Obscene language appears once, inside the sex chapter, and only in combination with audible ardour ↩

  3. OpenSubtitles 2024, Finnish monolingual file - OPUS, University of Helsinki, hosted by CSC. 107.5 million lines, 412 million words of Finnish dialogue ↩

  4. Kuvaohjelmalaki 710/2011 - Finlex. Chapter 3, section 15 requires the classifier to weigh the context in which events are shown ↩

  5. PEGI: what do the labels mean - Pan European Game Information. Bad language is one of the named content descriptors; mild swearing points at 12, strong language at 16, and no bad language should be heard at PEGI 3 ↩

  6. Miten suomalaiset kiroilivat ennen kristinuskoa? - Ulla-Maija Kulonen, Kielikello 1/1990. The Baltic loan stream into Proto-Finnic is dated to roughly 2,000 to 3,000 years ago ↩

perkele - a man standing beside a car with its bonnet up in a snowy Finnish car park, looking at the engine with flat fury
perkele Not the Finnish for "oh dear"
vittu - a woman on a Finnish tram platform staring at the departures screen having just missed one, hands in her pockets
vittu The most vulgar word in the language, and the one Finns say most
morkkis - a man sitting on the edge of an unmade bed at midday in yesterday's clothes holding his own head, grey light through a gap in the curtains
morkkis written moraalinen krapula The other hangover, and Finnish gives it its own word
ihan sama - a young man at a kitchen table lifting one shoulder at his partner's mother without looking up from his phone, rain on the window
ihan sama "Whatever" - and it lands harder than the translation suggests

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Questions people ask

Is perkele the strongest Finnish swear word?

It is in the top group and it is not the top of it. Research on swear-word force puts vittu first, with saatana and perkele behind it. Where perkele wins is recognisability abroad, which is a different measurement entirely.

Is perkele worse than damn?

Considerably. Damn is the rough translation and it is far too soft. The nearest English equivalent in force is a word that would not be printed in a newspaper, said as an oath and not as an insult.

Why do foreigners think perkele is the main Finnish swear word?

Because it is the one that travels. It is distinctively Finnish in a way the others are not, so it turns up in metal lyrics, on merchandise and in every article written about Finland, and none of that tracks how often Finns actually say it.

Can a Finnish film be rated 7 and still be full of swearing?

Yes. Swearing on its own is not a classification ground in Finland, so language does not raise an age limit unless the content behind it falls under violence, sex, anxiety or intoxicants.

What does perkele literally mean?

An old word for the devil, and before that, on the standard account, a Baltic word for thunder and the thunder god. The Lithuanian relative perkūnas still carries both senses.

Is perkele a religious word?

It became one. Mikael Agricola brought it into written Finnish in its Christian sense in the sixteenth century, by which point the word had been in speech for a very long time already.

Do Finnish swear words get bleeped on television?

There is no rule requiring it. What exists instead is a patchwork of broadcaster and distributor policy, which is why the same word passes in one place and is cut in another.

Should I say it?

Among friends, at your own mistake, it lands as comic more than offensive when a foreigner says it. That effect does not extend to an office, a shop or anybody's grandmother, and it wears off fast with repetition.