A study describing Finnish phonetics and analyzing prosodic properties is reported. Subjects were two female 17-year-olds, speakers of standard Finnish and well acquainted with each other. Data were drawn from two sources: a conversation between the two, in which one described a picture so the other could draw it, and one a set of stories narrated by the informants based on a series of connected pictures. The report first describes phonetically the informants' speech, including consonants with complete oral closure, velic opening and oral closure, lateral airflow, tapped and trilled articulations, open approximation, friction with and without voicing, voicelessness/breathy voice, glottal stop and creaky voice, resonance features, vowels, diphthongs, velic opening and vocalic articulations, variability of vowel quality, voiceless vowels, and quantity and duration. It then outlines a prosodic analysis of six features of inter-word junctions. It is concluded that a phonological statement can be made that takes into consideration phonetic characteristics that are considered irrelevant in most phonologies. Contains 31 references. (MSE)