BFF #3: Please

Good morning world! Let’s start this new week with a new post in the series called BeFriending Finland. BFF is all about exploring and hopefully explaining the quirks and peculiarities of Finnish culture and people. Today our topic is the little but quite common word we all know. That is please.

To put it in a one sentence: we do not have a word for “please”. There, I said it. This is one of the reasons why a foreigner might think that Finns are rude and impolite.

See, if one asks another to pass the salt, one would automatically add please to the end. Since we do not have that word, we don’t. We use conditional to make the sentence polite. So when a Finn says “ojentaisitko suolan” ("would you pass the salt"), he’s actually being very polite.

In the case of “yes, please”, we replace the “please” with "kiitos", which is “thank you”. Comparing it to English “no, thank you”, it’s not very different. Anothe way of going around "please" is to replace it with "ole hyvä" ("you're welcome", or literally "be good"). Such a case might be for example "please pay here" and that would be "maksa tähän, ole hyvä".

Kuva: Steven Depolo

Also as we have noticed how useful that little word is, it kind of has been adapted to our language. One might hear someone say “älä pliis tee noin” (“please, don’t do that”), where "pliis" is just a Finnish version of the word, written as it is pronounced, as the rest of Finnish language. Though I must admit in most cases it is used more in a non-honest, ironic kind of way. And all in all it is not very common and not at all official.

If I try to sum it up a bit, I’d say that if someone asks you to do something and doesn’t say please, he might not be impolite. He might just be Finnish.

Are there any other situations, where English speaking people use “please” I did not remember to talk about? Does your language have a word for “please”? Do you consider Finns rude?

Stay tuned for more, coming up next: What?