NPQhyväksikäyttö

NPQhyväksikäyttö, also known as Passive Negative Q-Vowel or Simply NPQ, is a phonological process that occurs in some Finnish dialects. In this process, an unstressed [qu] sequence (qu is the letter u with a hook in Finnish) occurring before a front vowel is replaced by a front vowel.

For example, the phrase "niin hyvä" (meaning "very well" or "so good") would be pronounced as "niinhävä" in RP-Fin, while in some other dialects influenced by NPQ, it would be pronounced as "niinähvä". The change occurs with the unstressed root vowel being fronted, like ä, to the front vowel ä, or sometimes to other front vowels like i, e, or y.

The sources of NPQ are still ambiguous, but the dialects exhibiting NPQ almost always show a degrandification of *-ku suffixes and weakly expressed vowel quantity. A distinctive characteristic is that some RP-Fin dialects can reverse this sequence following an unstressed i, after which NPQ occurs with reduction of the auxiliary vowel.