Finnish IRL

Terms of Use

Effective 7 September 2026. Last updated 8 September 2026.

These Terms of Use ("Terms") govern your access to and use of finnishirl.com (the "Site"), the daily newsletter, and anything else we publish (together, the "Services"). The Services are operated by Data Sauna LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, 30 N Gould St, Ste R, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA ("Finnish IRL", "we", "our", "us"). Using the Services means you agree to these Terms. If you do not, please do not use them.

1. Eligibility

The Services are intended for adults. The Site explains how Finnish is actually spoken, which includes swearing and words that are not safe in every room, and by using the Services or signing up for the newsletter you confirm that you are at least 18 years old.

2. What the Services are

Finnish IRL publishes word pages, articles, situations and quizzes about real spoken Finnish - puhekieli, slang, and the phrases people actually use - plus a daily newsletter. Everything is free to read, with no account and no paywall. It is offered for personal, educational and non-commercial reference. It is not a substitute for professional language instruction, and it is not a YKI preparation course: we cover comprehension, which is one part of that exam and not the whole of it. Nothing here is legal, medical, immigration or other expert advice.

3. Intellectual property

The text, illustrations, page design, typography, layout and code on the Site are owned by us or our licensors and protected by copyright and other intellectual property law. The Finnish IRL name and the drawn identity are ours.

What you may do without asking:

  • Read, use and learn from anything on the Site.
  • Link to any page.
  • Quote a sentence or two for non-commercial commentary, review or teaching, with attribution and a link back.
  • Save pages for your own offline reading.

What needs our prior written permission:

  • Republishing word pages, articles or quizzes wholesale - on a site, in a book, in a course, in an app, anywhere.
  • Scraping, crawling or bulk downloading content for redistribution or to train a third party's AI model.
  • Using the Finnish IRL name or visual identity in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation.
  • Commercial use of any kind, including paid courses and ad-supported reposts.

Two things are worth calling out separately. The illustrations are our own artwork, made with generative AI tools to our own brief and then chosen, corrected and composed here. We do not present them as drawn by hand, and every illustration file carries the standard IPTC tag that marks it as machine-generated, so a tool that reads image metadata can tell without having to ask. They are not licensed for reuse, and they are not evidence for anything - that is what the sources on each page are for. Third-party photographs are the opposite case: real documentary work by named photographers, carrying their own credit and licence in the caption. Those terms are the photographer's, not ours - if you want to reuse a photo, go to its licence, not to us.

For permissions or licensing: moi@finnishirl.com.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

  • Use the Services unlawfully or in breach of these Terms.
  • Probe, scan or test the Site's security, or work around any authentication.
  • Interfere with the Services or the servers behind them, including by flooding the signup form with automated requests.
  • Scrape the Site at a rate that degrades it for other people.
  • Reverse-engineer or decompile any part of the Services beyond what is already public.
  • Submit false, misleading or impersonating information to the signup form.

5. Newsletter

Signing up confirms you want the daily email. It is free, it is one email a day at most, and every one carries a one-click unsubscribe. We do not sell or share the list. We may pause, change or end the newsletter at any time without notice - it is an independent project, not a paid service. What happens to the address you give us is governed by the privacy policy.

6. External links and third-party services

The Services link out to third-party sites - dictionaries, Kotus, Yle, news articles, research. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content, products or privacy practices. Following one puts you under their terms. The same applies to any site you reach by clicking an ad - see section 8.

7. Accuracy, register and AI-assisted content

We use AI tools to research and draft, and everything is rewritten and checked by a human against real usage and against sources such as Kotus before it goes up. Every word page lists what it was checked against.

Even so, spoken language is a moving target and a regional one. Meaning shifts by city, generation, tone and context; a word that is ordinary in Helsinki can land differently in Oulu, and a word marked safe in one room can still be the wrong word in another. That is the nature of register, and it is why the pages say who says what to whom rather than just what a word means. Read the safety notes, use judgement, and do not make this Site your only source for anything that matters - a job interview, a complaint, a conversation with an official. If you spot a mistake, tell us: corrections from native speakers are the most useful mail this site gets and they go into the pages rather than into a backlog.

8. Advertising

The Site is supported by display advertising. Ads are served by Google AdSense and its advertising partners, and the ad script loads for every visitor. Our cookie banner controls whether those ads are personalized, not whether they appear; visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland - which is most of this Site's readers - see Google's own certified consent message, which governs personalization in those regions. The privacy policy and cookie policy have the detail.

We do not choose, write, review or endorse the individual ads that appear. Ad content, targeting and the pages an ad links to are controlled by the advertiser and the ad network, not by us. An ad appearing on Finnish IRL is not a recommendation, an endorsement, or a statement that we have checked the advertiser, its products, its claims or its website - including any ad for a language school, course or teacher, which has no connection to anything we write about. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not responsible or liable for advertiser content, offers or pricing, or for anything that happens on a third-party site you reach by clicking an ad. If an ad here looks like a scam or otherwise breaks Google's policies, email moi@finnishirl.com and we will report it.

Nothing we publish is paid for. No word page, article, situation or quiz is sponsored, and there are no affiliate links - what an ad network shows you in an ad slot has no bearing on what we write or how we write it.

You agree not to click, or cause any person, bot, script or service to click, ads on the Site in an artificial or fraudulent way. That includes clicking the same ad repeatedly to inflate revenue, automated or incentivised clicks, click exchanges and paid traffic schemes - anything the ad network treats as invalid traffic. This can cost us the ad account, and we may block access and report it.

We may display ads anywhere on the Site, add, remove or change ad partners, formats and placements, and change how the Site is monetised, at any time and without notice. We may also run the Site with fewer ads, or none.

9. Disclaimer of warranties

The Services are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including to the maximum extent permitted by law the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, non-infringement and uninterrupted availability. We do not warrant that the Services will be error-free, secure or always up.

10. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent applicable law allows, Data Sauna LLC is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data, goodwill or business opportunities, arising out of or in connection with your use of, or inability to use, the Services - even if we were advised such damages were possible. Our total liability for direct damages arising from these Terms or the Services is limited to one hundred United States dollars (US$100).

Nothing here excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or under mandatory consumer-protection rules - which for readers in Finland and elsewhere in the EEA include rights that cannot be waived by a contract like this one.

11. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Data Sauna LLC from any claims, liabilities, damages, losses and expenses, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Services, or your violation of any law or third-party right.

12. Termination

We may suspend or end your access to the Services at any time, with or without notice, if you breach these Terms or for any other reason we think is reasonable, such as protecting the Site from abuse. The sections that should survive termination - intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, governing law - keep applying.

13. Governing law and disputes

These Terms, and any non-contractual obligations arising from them, are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts in Wyoming have exclusive jurisdiction over disputes about the Services or these Terms. Nothing in this clause stops you bringing a claim in the courts of your own country or state where mandatory consumer-protection law gives you that right - which, for a consumer resident in Finland or elsewhere in the EEA, it generally does.

14. Changes

We may update these Terms. Material changes show up in the "effective" and "last updated" dates at the top, and anything significant gets flagged in the newsletter. Continuing to use the Services after a change takes effect means you accept it.

15. Severability

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, it will be limited or removed to the smallest extent necessary and the rest stays in force.

16. Entire agreement

These Terms, together with the privacy policy and the cookie policy, are the whole agreement between you and us about the Services, and replace anything said on the subject before.

17. Contact

Questions, permission requests, corrections: moi@finnishirl.com, or the contact page.