alkukirjain

Alkukirjain is the Finnish term for a capital letter, the uppercase form of a letter in the Latin script. In Finnish typography and orthography, alkukirjain denotes the uppercase variant used in writing and typesetting. Finnish text normally uses uppercase for the first letter of a sentence and for proper nouns, acronyms, and certain titles, while most common nouns are written in lowercase. Unlike English, Finnish generally capitalizes days of the week and months only when they begin a sentence, not as a standard rule.

The Finnish alphabet consists of 29 letters: the basic Latin letters a–z plus å, ä and ö. Each letter has a corresponding uppercase form, such as A–Z, Å, Ä, Ö, used according to standard capitalization rules. In typography, alkukirjain shapes may vary by font, but their basic function as uppercase counterparts remains constant.

In digital text, uppercase letters are encoded in Unicode and can be produced programmatically using locale-sensitive case conversion functions. Capitalization rules are part of the broader Finnish orthography taught in schools and enforced in official writing.

See also: lowercase letter, capitalization, Finnish orthography, Unicode uppercase mapping.