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In the Finnish language, the letter D is never pronounced as soft as in English or Swedish. The linguists trying to create a "uniform Finnish language" for writing ran into a problem: there was phoneme that every dialect pronounced differently. It was developed from a voiced dental fricative, but dialects used things like an absence of any phoneme, a hiatus, a flap consonant, T, R, J, JJ, or T-H. For example, "of your water" could be (*undocumented):
- teiän veen
- tei'än ve'en
- teirän veren
- teijjän vejen
- teidän veden
- *teitän veten
- *teiðän veðen
- *teid-hän *vet-hen
So, they decided to substitute the letter D for this position. Now, especially dialectal Finnish does not use voiced stops such as B, D or G, so this wound up being foreign for almost everyone. Nevertheless, it was decided that "proper Finnish" uses a soft D, which should be pronounced as soft as the Swedish D. Today, this case of "proper Finnish" orthodoxy is no longer practiced, but as a result there is a large population of people who pronounce the D, even though it's less voiced than the "proper D". It can be said that Finnish T is a T without aspiration, and Finnish D is a D without voiced stop character.
For example, Väinö Linna uses the "soft D" as a hallmark of unpleasant command language in the novel The Unknown Soldier.
Interestingly, Stadin slangi, the dialect of Helsinki proper, uses voiced stops even in native words, e.g. dallas "s/he walked".
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