Officialese and Bureaucratic Style

Virkakieli — the dense, impersonal Finnish of laws, forms, official letters and administrative decisions — is a register built to background who is doing what. Its critics call it kapulakieli, roughly "gobbledygook" (literally "stick-language"), and Finland runs an official campaign against its excesses. For a learner, virkakieli is worth studying not to imitate but to decode: you will meet it the moment you receive a tax letter, a residence-permit decision or a tenancy contract, and its compression is systematic enough that a few markers unlock most of it. This page names those markers, shows a bureaucratic sentence beside a plain rewrite, and warns against the very common error of letting this style creep into ordinary email.

Underlying all of it is a legal irony: the Finnish Administrative Procedure Act (hallintolaki) actually requires clear language of authorities. Yet the style persists, which tells you it is a genuine register with its own pull, not merely bad writing.

Marker 1: nominalization — verbs turned into nouns

The engine of virkakieli is nominalization: turning verbs into nouns, chiefly with -minen (the "-ing" verbal noun) and with derivational suffixes like -us / -os. Hakea "to apply" becomes hakeminen "applying" or hakemus "an application"; päättää "to decide" becomes päätös "a decision"; toimittaa "to deliver" becomes toimittaminen. Once actions are frozen into nouns, whole sentences can be built with almost no live verbs — which is precisely the effect the register wants.

The mechanics of these verbal nouns are covered under nominalization; here the point is stylistic. Every -minen is a place where a plain verb — and often its subject — has been dissolved.

Marker 2: the agentless passive

Finnish officialese leans hard on the passive, which in Finnish is inherently agentless — it states that something is done without naming the doer. This is the register's second way of hiding the actor: not "the office will process your application" but "the application will be processed".

The passive's role in formal writing has its own treatment at the passive in writing. In virkakieli it combines with nominalization to produce prose in which, sometimes, no human being appears at all.

Marker 3: participle postpositions — koskien, liittyen, johtuen

A distinctive tic of the register is a set of participle forms used as postpositions or connectives: koskien "concerning", liittyen "relating to", johtuen "due to", koskeva "concerning" (as a modifier). These are the instructive of the second infinitive (see the second infinitive instructive), and they let the writer bolt a heavy adverbial onto a sentence without a subordinate clause.

These are grammatical and even useful in moderation, but piled up they are a reliable fingerprint of officialese, and the plain-language movement targets them for replacement by ordinary koska "because" and -sta/-stä case forms.

Marker 4: the necessive — on toimitettava, tulee tehdä

Obligation in virkakieli is expressed impersonally through necessive structures, above all the -ttava / -ttävä participle ("must be X-ed") and the modal tulee + infinitive "shall/must". On toimitettava "must be delivered", on esitettävä "must be presented", tulee hakea "must apply". Like the passive, these background the actor: they say a thing must be done without saying by whom.

The full paradigm of -ttava obligation lives at the necessive participle. Note the two forms in the examples: back-vowel toimitettava with -ttava, front-vowel esitettävä with -ttävä — the harmony split matters (see the mistakes below).

The two-marker decoding key

Here is the practical shortcut. Of all its machinery, virkakieli leans on two tools above the rest to erase the actor: the -minen verbal noun and the -ttava/-ttävä necessive participle. Train your eye to spot those two — täyttäminen, toimittaminen; toimitettava, esitettävä — and most bureaucratic sentences decode at a glance, because those two markers are precisely where a live verb and its human subject have been dissolved. Recover the verb and supply the missing "you" or "the office", and the meaning falls out.

Watch the whole transformation on one sentence, from full officialese to plain language:

The plain-language countercurrent: selkeä virkakieli and selkokieli

Officialese is under organised attack. The Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus) promotes selkeä virkakieli "clear official language" — plainer administrative writing that still counts as standard yleiskieli. Distinct from it, and more radical, is selkokieli "plain/easy language": a formally defined simplified variety, with shorter sentences and controlled vocabulary, produced for readers with reading or language difficulties. Both push against kapulakieli, but they are not the same thing — selkeä virkakieli is ordinary clear standard prose, whereas selkokieli is a deliberately simplified register with its own guidelines.

Comparison with English

English has the identical disease — "Applications must be submitted...", "with regard to...", "the aforementioned party" — and the same cure, the Plain English movement, mirrors Finland's selkeä virkakieli campaign almost point for point. So English speakers recognise the smell of officialese immediately. The transfer error is different: it is importing this register into ordinary Finnish email, where it reads cold and evasive. An English speaker who would never write "I am in receipt of your communication" to a friend can nonetheless reach for Viestiänne koskien ilmoitan... in Finnish, mistaking bureaucratic heaviness for politeness. In everyday correspondence, plainer is warmer.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Virkakieli / kapulakieli is Finnish bureaucratic style: dense, impersonal, built to background the actor. Study it to decode, not to imitate.
• Four markers: nominalization (-minen, -us/-os), the agentless passive, participle postpositions (koskien, liittyen, johtuen), and necessive structures (on toimitettava, tulee tehdä).
• The decoding key is two of those markers: spot the -minen verbal noun and the -ttava/-ttävä necessive participle, restore a live verb and a real subject, and the sentence opens up.
• Keep the double consonant and harmony in the necessive: back toimitettava, front esitettävä — never toimitetava or esitettava.
• Finland pushes back with selkeä virkakieli (clear standard writing) and the distinct selkokieli (a defined easy-language variety). The learner's error is importing officialese into ordinary email, where plainer is warmer.