In Finnish, only the plosives — Finnish plosives being /ptk/ and /ppttkk/ — appearing as the onset of the last syllable in a stem are affected by the gradation. The nominative of the noun, and the first infinitive stem (without the I infinitive ending ''-ta'' or ''-da'') are most often of the "strong" grade. When the word is declined, the last consonant in the stem changes to its "weak" grade, and the inflectional ending is added. In Archiphonemic terms, the mutation is Lenition ; with geminates, the loss of gemination, with simple consonants, lenition into an archiphonemic fricative:
- β, ---θ, ---γ are phonetic coefficients with no single phonemic value, realized according to their phonetic environment. They can be thought as something that plays the role of bilabial, dental and velar fricatives, which are not found in modern Finnish. Finnish used to have them, and has lost them relatively recently. For example, the Voiced Velar Fricative explains the disappearance of 'k', as in ''parkua'' → ''paruttiin''. Since the phonetic environment controls the realization, the number of actual patterns is large. Often assimilation produces a geminate, e.g. ''lampi'' → ---''lamβən'' → ''lammen'' (where ''ə'' represents vowel epenthesis). Without the historical perspective, this phoneme be analyzed as a Chroneme , a consonant exhibited as a lengthening of the previous consonant.
The most common realizations are:
- 'p' changes to 'v', puku ~ puvun
- 't' changes to 'd', täti ~ tädin
- 'k' elides, keko ~ keon
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