Finnish Phonology - Stress

Stress

Like Hungarian and Icelandic, Finnish always places the primary stress on the first syllable of a word. Secondary stress normally falls on odd syllables. Contrary to primary stress, Finnish secondary stress is quantity sensitive. Thus, if secondary stress would fall on a light (CV.) syllable, with a heavy (CVV. or CVC.) syllable following, then the secondary stress is moved one syllable to the right, and the preceding foot (syllable group) will contain three syllables. Thus, omenanani "as my apple" contains light syllables only, and has primary stress on the first syllable and secondary on the third, as expected. In omenanamme "as our apple", on the other hand, the third syllable (na) is light and the fourth heavy (nam), thus secondary stress falls on the fourth syllable. Certain Finnish dialects also have quantitiave-sensitive main stress pattern, but instead of moving the initial stress, they geminate the consonant, so that e.g. light-heavy CV.CVV becomes heavy-heavy CVCCVV. E.g. the partitive form of "fish" is pronounced kalaa in the quantity-insensitive dialects but kallaa in the quantity-sensitive ones (cf. also the examples under the "Length" section).

Secondary stress falls on the first syllable on non-initial parts of compounds, for example the compound puunaama, meaning "wooden face" (from puu "tree" and naama "face"), is pronounced but puunaama, meaning "which was cleaned" (...preceded by an agent in genitive, "by someone"), is pronounced .