Finnish IRL

9 untranslatable Finnish words, counted. 6 barely exist

Nine famous Finnish words, counted in 411.8 million words of dialogue. Two turn out to be ordinary vocabulary and six are close to absent, which is not the result we went looking for.

Finland, explained Published Updated 7 min read

Quick answer

  • In 411.8 million words of Finnish film and television dialogue, kalsarikännit occurs 8 times, jokamiehenoikeudet 18, kaamos 29 and myötähäpeä 32. Kiitos occurs 1,015,835 times in the same text.
  • The list splits rather than collapsing. Against kalsarikännit's 8, sisu has 3,520 hits and mökki 11,018, so the idea that Finns never use any of these words is wrong.
  • What is rare is the set of words that name a specific Finnish arrangement: the right to roam, the sleepless winter dark, the volunteer work party, the steam off the stones.
  • Part of the gap is the corpus. Subtitle dialogue is largely translated from other languages, so a word with no foreign equivalent has no reason to be typed. That explains part of the gap. It does not explain a gap this wide.

What you'll learn

  • How often each famous Finnish word actually turns up, with a control to measure it against
  • Which two of the nine are ordinary Finnish and which six are close to absent
  • Why a word can be real, loved and almost never said
  • What the counting method can and cannot see

Eight.

That is how many times kalsarikännit occurs in 411.8 million words of Finnish film and television dialogue. In the same text, kiitos occurs 1,015,835 times.

We went looking for the nine words these lists always carry, in the largest downloadable body of Finnish dialogue there is. The result is not the flat debunking we expected.

A street of 1950s apartment blocks in the Harju district of Helsinki, cars parked along the kerb on a bright March day
Aleksis Kiven katu in Helsinki. Nothing said on this street all day will contain any of the nine words belowPhoto: Yehia Eweis / Wikimedia Commons

The count

WordHitsPer million words
WordkiitosHits1,015,835Per million words2,466.83
WordjooHits224,893Per million words546.12
WordkahviHits57,059Per million words138.56
WordperkeleHits21,023Per million words51.05
WordmökkiHits11,018Per million words26.76
Wordsisu (noun)Hits3,520Per million words8.55
WordsaunaHits1,892Per million words4.59
WordlöylyHits135Per million words0.33
WordtalkootHits44Per million words0.11
WordmyötähäpeäHits32Per million words0.08
WordkaamosHits29Per million words0.07
WordjokamiehenoikeudetHits18Per million words0.04
WordkalsarikännitHits8Per million words0.02

The top four are controls, there to give the rest a scale. Perkele earns its place in that group by never appearing on a beautiful-words list and outscoring every word that does by a factor of four.

What was counted, and what the count cannot see

The corpus is 411.8 million alphabetic tokens of Finnish subtitle dialogue. The method is set out in full here and is not repeated.

This pass reads a hand-written list of inflected forms per word, including the plurals and partitives the rare ones actually live in: jokamiehenoikeudet, myötähäpeää, kalsarikännejä. It does not read compounds, derivatives or verbs, which is why sauna comes out low: saunoa and saunailta are invisible to it. Every figure here is a floor.

The corpus is mostly translated dialogue. A word that exists because Finland has an arrangement no other country has is a word a translator never needs. That explains part of the gap, and it does not explain a gap this wide.

The list splits in two

The expected finding was that none of these words gets used. That is not what came back.

Sisu is the one that is genuinely in use, at 3,520 hits for the noun, with the adjective sisukas on top of that.

Whether 3,520 is a lot depends entirely on what you hold it against, and this is where the site’s own post on sisu is doing a different sum. Set beside jaksaa, the ordinary verb for having the energy for something, the famous noun is outnumbered more than ten to one and the conclusion is that Finns use it far less than the reputation implies. Set beside kalsarikännit, it is four hundred and forty times more common. Both are the same 3,520 hits. That post owns the comparison with real Finnish; this one is only comparing the famous words with each other.

A red wooden cottage with a sauna chimney, a hammock and a plank deck at the water's edge
The one word on the list that is both common and load-bearing. Half of July happens herePhoto: Margo Evardson / Pexels

Mökki is more ordinary still, at 26.76 per million, which puts a summer cottage in the same frequency band as a great many perfectly plain nouns. It is the most useful word on any of these lists and the one that gets the least attention, because a cottage is not mysterious enough to write a post about.

Then the floor drops. Everything below sauna in the table occurs less than once per two million words, and four of them occur in double digits across the whole corpus.

kaamos, 29 hits
Two months of winter with no daylight in the north, and a word for it that turns up once per fourteen million words of dialogue.
jokamiehenoikeudet, 18 hits
The legal right to walk, camp and pick berries on land you do not own. Eighteen.
A smoke sauna stove built of loose stones on a stone hearth, split firewood stacked beside it
Löyly is the steam that comes off these stones when water hits them. It is a noun for a physical event, not a feeling, which is why it is rare in dialogue and unmissable in a saunaPhoto: MattiPaavola / Wikimedia Commons

What the rare ones have in common

They name things outside the speaker rather than states inside one.

Jokamiehenoikeudet is a body of law, published and maintained as such.1 Talkoot is a way of organising unpaid work. Löyly is what the stones do. Kaamos is a fact about latitude. None of them is a subtle emotion that Finnish alone can express, which is how the lists usually sell them.

A word for a local arrangement is rare in dialogue for the same reason that henkilötunnus is: you say it when the arrangement comes up, and it comes up rarely, and everyone present already knows what it is.

Myötähäpeä is the exception in that group, because it is an emotion word rather than an institution, and a useful one.

It is also the one figure here not to trust. Thirty-two hits is a statement about translated film dialogue, where the English said “I couldn’t watch” and the Finnish translator wrote something else. Out in the open, myötähäpeä is the word Finns reach for constantly, and it is the standard Finnish for what English needed “cringe” for. This is where the corpus is measuring itself rather than the country, and talkoot is probably in the same position: a housing-company work party every spring does not turn up in a film.

A small log smoke sauna standing on stones among birches beside a lake in summer
A savusauna at the Muuratsalo Experimental House in Jyväskylä. A word for a local arrangement comes up when the arrangement does, and no more often than thatPhoto: Antti Leppänen / Wikimedia Commons

The one that got famous without being used

Kalsarikännit is the clearest case, and eight occurrences is not a rounding error, it is a result.

The word is real, the practice is real and thoroughly ordinary. What is not ordinary is the international profile, and the story of where that came from is a separate one. A word can be genuine, widely understood, funny, and still almost never spoken, and this is what that looks like in numbers.

  1. 1
    Learn them to recognise, not to deploy
    All nine are real words and you will meet several of them. Producing one unprompted, on the other hand, is the single most reliable way to sound like somebody who has read a list.
  2. 2
    Spend the same effort on the top of the table
    Kiitos and joo are the two most common words in the whole count. An hour on either returns more than an hour on all nine famous ones together.
  3. 3
    Keep mökki
    It is the one item on the list with both the frequency and the cultural load. A mökki organises the Finnish summer, and knowing the word tells you what half of July is about.

None of which makes the rare ones worthless. Kaamos matters enormously to the people living through it twice a year, and a word you meet twice a year is still a word.

What the lists cost you is the comparison. They present nine specialised nouns as everyday vocabulary, and the everyday vocabulary they leave out is the part that would actually help you follow a conversation.

Footnotes

  1. Jokamiehenoikeudet - Metsähallitus, Parks & Wildlife Finland, on the rights the word names ↩

sisu - a woman in a reflective work jacket pushing a bicycle up a slushy hill into driving sleet, a plain Finnish apartment block behind her
sisu The noun is the export. Finns reach for a different form of it
kalsarikännit - a man in a knitted cardigan and underwear in an armchair with a beer, thawing spring fields through the window
kalsarikännit Trousers off, curtains shut, nowhere to be
myötähäpeä - a woman in a bar watching something off to the side with both hands half over her face, unable to look away
myötähäpeä One word for the feeling that makes you cover your eyes at a wedding speech
löyly - a man on a sauna bench tipping a ladle of water onto the hot stones while the younger man beside him braces
löyly The word meant soul for four thousand years before it meant steam

More reading

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Sisu was a bad quality before it was a good one
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Questions people ask

Are untranslatable Finnish words fake?

No. Every word here is real, current and in the dictionary. What the lists get wrong is frequency: they present a set of rare nouns as though it were everyday vocabulary.

If they are this rare, why does everyone know them?

Because they travel well. A word that names something no other country has is exactly the word a travel article reaches for, and the frequency it has at home never comes up.

Which Finnish words would a frequency list actually put on a poster?

Kiitos, joo, ei, no niin, jaksaa. None of them is mysterious and all of them are load-bearing, which is presumably why nobody sells them on a tea towel.

Is it rude to use one?

Not at all, and nobody will wince. It will place you, the way any low-frequency word does when a foreigner produces it fluently and nothing else.

Does a bigger corpus change the answer?

For the very low numbers, no. Eight occurrences in 412 million words is not a sampling accident. For ranking the rare ones against each other, yes, and that ranking is not worth much.

Why is sauna so low in the table?

Because the count reads exact word forms, and sauna spends much of its life inside compounds and verbs like saunoa and saunailta, which the count does not see. It is the clearest limitation in the method.

What is the most useful word on the list?

Mökki, by a distance. It is common, it is concrete, and the thing it names organises a large part of the Finnish year.

Is there a Finnish word for the feeling of reading a list like this?

Myötähäpeä, second-hand embarrassment, which occurs 32 times in 412 million words of translated film dialogue and rather more often than that in Finland. It is the one word in the table where the corpus is measuring itself.