Date and time notation in Finland

Date

In Finland the usual way of writing dates in normal text is with the months spelled out.^[1][2] The format varies according to the language used. In Finnish a period is placed after the day to indicate an ordinal: “31. toukokuuta 2002”; furthermore, the month is in the partitive case, always marked by -ta. In Swedish the period is not used: “den 31 maj 2002”. The date can be preceded by the weekday (also lower case), in Finnish in essive case: “perjantaina 31. toukokuuta 2002”, “fredagen den 31 maj 2002”. The Finnish language has month names differing from most other languages; three letter abbreviations are not used in Finnish, and the months are not capitalized (they are not considered proper names).

The all-numeric form for dates is in the order “day month year”, using a period as the separator. Example: “31.5.2002” or “31.5.02”. Years can be written with two or four digits, and numbers may be written with or without leading zero. Also a form with a slash is common in Swedish, especially in hand written text: “31/5 2002” or “31/5 -02”. The weekday may be prepended: “fredag 31/5 -02”

The ISO 8601 notation (“2002-05-31”) is not used in normal text in Finland, but may be used e.g. in lists.

Time

The 12-hour clock is used in the spoken language and idiomatic expressions. The 24-hour notation is used in writing, with a period as the standardized and recommended separator (e.g. “15.07” or “8.27”). However, colon is almost exclusively used instead of period in computing environments. The conventions are the same for Finnish and Swedish.

References

1. ^ Miten päiväys merkitään?
2. ^ Räkneord och datum, Reuters ruta 11/1 1991