Sanavälillä

Sanavälillä is the Finnish term for the space between words, i.e., the word boundary in written text. The base noun sanaväli means “word space,” and the form sanavälillä expresses location at the boundary between words (for example “sanavälillä” = between words). In typography and orthography, the sanaväli is normally realized as a whitespace character that visually separates words. In digital text, the sanaväli can be a regular space, a non-breaking space, or other whitespace characters, chosen to influence line breaks and justification.

Significance: The concept is central in linguistics, typographic design, and computer text processing. In natural language processing, correctly identifying sanavälillä (word boundaries) is essential for tokenization, lemmatization, and parsing. While Finnish uses spaces to separate words, other languages may lack explicit sanavälit and require segmentation algorithms to determine word boundaries. Clitics, punctuation, and hyphenation can blur or redefine the boundary at sanavälillä, affecting how a sentence is parsed or displayed.

Example: “Tässä lauseessa sanaväli on normaalisti yksi välilyönti sanojen välillä.” This sentence illustrates the concept: the sanaväli between words is typically a single space.

See also: word boundary, whitespace, tokenization, typography, hyphenation.