Long mid vowels are more common in unstressed syllables. The table below lists the conventionally postulated diphthongs in Finnish. In speech i. That is to say, the two portions of the diphthong are not broken by a pause or stress pattern.
In Finnish, diphthongs contrast with both long vowels and short vowels. Phonologically, however, Finnish diphthongs are usually analyzed as sequences of two vowels this in contrast to languages like English , where the diphthongs are best analyzed as independent phonemes.
Diphthongs ending in i can occur in any syllable, but those ending in rounded vowels usually occur only in initial syllables, and rising diphthongs are confined to that syllable.
It is usually taught that diphthongization occurs only with the combinations listed. However, there are recognized situations in which other vowel pairs diphthongize. Since that time new doubled mid vowels have come to the language from various sources.
Among the phonological processes operating in Finnish dialects are diphthongization and diphthong reduction. Finnish, like many other Uralic languages , has the phenomenon called vowel harmony , which restricts the cooccurrence in a word of vowels belonging to different articulatory subgroups. Vowels within a word "harmonize" to be either all front or all back.
