Jälkiosa

Jälkiosa is a term used in Finnish phonology to describe the consonant portion of a syllable that follows the nucleus. In syllable theory, a typical syllable is analyzed as onset, nucleus, and coda; the onset consists of the initial consonants before the nucleus, the nucleus is the central vowel or vowel sound, and the jälkiosa (the coda) consists of the consonant(s) that come after the nucleus.

In Finnish, the nucleus is usually a vowel (or a long vowel), and the jälkiosa is optional. The coda can be a single consonant or a consonant cluster, though Finnish phonotactics impose restrictions on which clusters are allowed and, in practice, codas tend to be limited in length. The presence and shape of the jälkiosa contribute to syllable weight and to the rhyming properties of a syllable, which can influence prosody and rhythm in speech. Finnish stress is fixed on the first syllable, while the combination of nucleus length and coda length helps determine the overall temporal structure of a word.

The term jälkiosa is used primarily in linguistic descriptions of Finnish syllable structure. It is etymologically formed from jälki meaning “remainder” or “after” and osa meaning “part.” In broader linguistic contexts, this concept is equivalent to the coda in syllable theory.