This is a best-effort data-driven Hunspell dictionary for Finnish spellchecking. It is definitely useful and much better than the nothing which was available so far, but by its nature, its coverage of rare forms is not perfect. Nevertheless, it gets the job done in most situations. Why was it developed? The "flagship" Finnish spelling effort, Voikko, is not compatible with WebExtentions and that means there is no spellchecker of Finnish in Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. as of 12/2023. I do not take any position on how things should be developed, and I do understand how that situation came out to be. But from a user's perspective, the sad fact is that Finnish is not a supported spelling language in Thunderbird. As a foreigner living in Finland, who has to write emails in Finnish all the time, this affects my productivity.
As a stopgap solution, I built this best-effort dictionary using the following resources:
- The TurkuNLP Finnish parsebank, a large corpus of parsed Finnish. This is my source of the necessary (baseform,wordform) pairs.
- Voikko to filter this vocabulary down to correctly spelled forms.
- The hunspell-builder program which was developed for the Slovak hunspell project, and which is capable of building a dictionary directly from a list of (baseform,wordform) pairs.
You can grab the latest version here: https://github.com/fginter/hunspell-fi/releases/latest The .xpi extension file is a regular zip file which includes the hunspell dictionaries (fi_FI.dic and fi_FI.aff). The extension can be directly installed to Thunderbird and Firefox.
I am sorry, I have no time to properly evaluate this beyond "I am using it daily and it does fine for me". I suspect that it might be insufficient for a native Finn fine-tuning carefully crafted text, but it seems more than enough for a foreigner like me, struggling to decide between uutiset and uuttiset. :) One way or another, it is much, much better than nothing. :)
CC0
TurkuNLP, Voikko, and the authors of huspell-builder
Built, packaged, and released on 6.12.2023 as Finnish Independence Day present to this glorious country. Hyvää itsenäisyyspäivää!