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Samuli Paulaharju was a Finnish ethnographer who visited the Kven minority in Northern Norway – Ruija – in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with his wife Jenny he collected ethnographic material among the Kvens, and corresponded frequently with some of them. Many wrote in Finnish, and most were self-taught writers.

We focus on the orthography used by these writers who were writing in a multilingual environment. We identify two writing cultures, one associated with Old Literary Finnish and Early Modern Finnish, the other with Modern Written Finnish (MWF). The orthography used by the former is characterized by the use of b, d, g for p, t, k in native Finnish words, which we attribute to influence from Norwegian. By contrast, the orthography of the latter largely resembles the MWF of the time. However, both groups substitute t for d – a phenomenon found in Finland during the same time period – as well as occasionally use Norwegian characters.

Using evidence from Finnish, this paper provides a rhythm-based motivation for, and explanation of, the Optimality-Theoretic constraint NonFinality, while at the same time showing how secondary stress serves a demarcative function in the language. The paper provides evidence that the general prohibition against final stress in Finnish is due to an avoidance of stress clash at the phrasal level, similar to the avoidance of clash at the word level, thus rendering the constraint NonFinality unnecessary. Primary stress in Finnish is invariably initial and thus serves a clear demarcative function by signaling to the listener the beginning of a new word. While the purely rhythmic stress pattern of Finnish includes secondary stresses on alternate non-final syllables, it is demonstrated that long odd-parity words have a secondary stress peak on the penult instead of the antepenult, contra previous accounts of Finnish stress. It is argued that this rightmost-but-not-final pattern of secondary stress serves a demarcative function similar to the demarcative function of primary stress, by signaling the right edge of the prosodic word.