Finnish language grammar
This article details the grammar of the Finnish language. There are separate articles covering the sound patterns of Finnish, and the ways in which spoken Finnish differs from the formal grammar of the written language. It is probably best to read the introduction to Finnish and Finnish language phonetics articles to make best use of this article.=Pronouns= The pronouns are inflected in the Finnish language much in the same way than their referent nouns are.
Since Finnish verbs are inflected for person, personal pronouns are not required for sense and are usually omitted in written Finnish except where used for emphasis. In spoken Finnish, however, the pronouns are generally used.
In common with some other languages, the second person plural can be used as a polite form when addressing one person. This usage is diminishing in Finnish society.
[EDIT: personal pronouns are not required when talking about 1st & 2nd persons (both singular and plural), however, when talking about 3rd persons (both singular and plural), the pronoun is needed: "hän menee" = he goes, "he menevät" = they go. This applies for both, colloquial and written language.]
Personal pronouns
Unlike in English, the personal pronouns are used to refer to human beings only. The personal pronouns in Finnish in the nominative case are:
;Singular
;Plural:
;Polite: Te = you Demonstrative Pronouns
The demonstratives are used of non-human animate entities and inanimate objects. However, se and ne are often used to refer to humans in colloquial Finnish. Furthermore, the demonstratives are used to refer to group nouns and the number of the pronoun must correlate with the number of its referent.
;Singular
;Plural
Interrogative pronouns
[EDIT: "ken" is somewhat old word itself as its nominative form, however, "ketä" is a word derived from it, and it's fairly common: "Ketä rakastat?" = "Who do you love?"]Relative pronouns
Reciprocal pronouns
Reflexive pronouns
Indefinite pronouns
A large group that entails all of the pronouns that do not fall into any of the categories above.
Some indefinite adjectives are often perceived as indefinite pronouns. These include:
=Noun forms=
The Finnish language does not distinguish gender in nouns or even in personal pronouns: 'hän' = 'he' or 'she' depending on the referent. This causes some unaccustomed Finnish speakers to muddle "he" and "she" when speaking languages such as English or Swedish, which can be a source of confusion.Cases
Finnish has fifteen noun cases: four grammatical cases, six locative cases and five marginal cases. Please see the article Finnish language noun cases for details.
Finnish cases
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The stem for these words removes the '-nen' and adds '-s(e)' after which the inflectional ending is added:
[EDIT: "muovisessa pussissa" means literally "in a bag made of plastic". A more fluent way to say "in a plastic bag" is simply to say "muovipussissa" (written together). The same applies for "muoviseen laatikkoon" -> "muovilaatikkoon" = "into a/the plastic box".]
The result is that the partitive singular adds a 't' followed by the partitive ending appropriate to a consonant stem 'ta'. Other case forms add an 'e' followed by the case ending:
For example, here are some adjectives:
Notice also:
There are very few irregular verbs in Finnish. In fact, only 'olla' = 'to be' has irregular endings (and then only in the present tense for the 3rd-person forms). A handful of verbs, including 'nähdä' = 'to see', 'tehdä' = 'to do/make', and 'juosta' = 'to run' have mildly irregular stems.
As a final oddity, Finnish does not have a verb corresponding to 'to have' - possession is indicated in other ways. For animate possessors, the adessive case is used with 'olla', for example 'koiralla on häntä' = 'the dog has a tail' - literally 'on the dog is a tail'.
"talo maalataan" = "the house is being painted"
The time when the house is being painted could be added:
"talo maalataan marraskuussa" = "the house will be painted in November"
The colour and method could be added: "talo maalataan punaiseksi harjalla" = the house is being painted red with a brush"
But, nothing more can be said about the person doing the painting ! There is no mechanism for saying "the house is being painted by Jim".
Hence the form "maalataan" is the only one which is needed. Notice also that the subject of the verb (i.e. the object of the action) is in the nominative case. Verbs which govern the partitive case continue to do so in the passive, and where the subject is a personal pronoun, that goes into its special accusative form: "minut unohdettiin" = "I was forgotten"
It can also be said that in the Finnish passive the agent is always human and never mentioned. A sentence such as "the tree was blown down" would translate poorly into Finnish because of a mental image of a group of people huffing ang puffing and trying to blow the tree down...
Because of its vagueness about who is performing the action, the passive can also translate the English "one does {something}", "{something} is generally done": "sanotaan että..." = "they say that..."
In modern spoken Finnish, the passive form of the verb is used after "me" to mean "we do {something}" ("me tullaan" = "we are coming") and on its own at the beginning of a sentence to mean "let's ..." ("mennään!" = "let's go!"). In the first of these cases, the "me" cannot be omitted without risk to comprehension, unlike with the 'standard' form "tulemme".
Formation of the passive will be dealt with under the verb types below.
[EDIT: "talo maalataan" literally means "a house is painted". "taloa maalataan" means "a house is being painted (right now)". There is a big difference whether you say "talo" or "taloa", because the partitive form sometimes also indicates the tense of the clause.]
In the former case, and unlike in English, the conditional must be used in both halves of the Finnish sentence:
"ymmärtäisin jos puhuisit hitaammin" = *"I would understand if you would speak more slowly"
The characteristic morphology of the Finnish conditional is 'isi' inserted between the verb stem and the personal ending. This can result in a 'closed' syllable becoming 'open' and so trigger consonant gradation:
'tiedän' = 'I know', 'tietäisin' = 'I would know'
cf. 'haluan' = 'I want', 'haluaisin' = 'I would like'
Conditional forms exists for both active and passive voices, and for present, perfect and pluperfect tenses.
The singular imperative is simply the verb's present tense without any personal ending (that is, chop the '-n' off the first person singular form):
The Finnish language has no simple equivalent to the English "please". The Finnish equivalent is to use either 'ole hyvä' or 'olkaa hyvä' = 'be good', but it is generally omitted. Politeness is normally conveyed by tone of voice, facial expression, and use of conditional verbs and partitive nouns.
The characteristic morphology of the Finnish conditional is -ne- inserted between the verb stem and the personal ending.
Potential forms exists for both active and passive voices, and for present and perfect tenses:
The eventive mood is used in the Kalevala. It is a combination of the potential and the conditional. It is also used in dialects of Estonian.
Finnish verbs are described as having four, sometimes five infinitives:
The second infinitive is formed by replacing the final 'a'/'ä' of the first infinitive with 'e' then adding the appropriate inflectional ending. If the vowel before the 'a'/'ä' is already an 'e', this becomes 'i' (see example from 'lukea' = 'to read').
The cases in which the second infinitive can appear are:
;Active Inessive (while someone is in the act of)
The third infinitive is formed by taking the verb stem with its consonant in the strong form, then adding 'ma' followed by the case inflection.
The cases in which the third infinitive can appear are:
;inessive: 'lukemassa' = '(in the act of) reading'
Note that the '-ma' form without a case ending is called the 'agent participle' (see 'participles' below). The agent participle can also be inflected in all cases, producing forms which look similar to the third infinitive.
The third infinitive is formed by taking the verb stem with its consonant in the strong form, then adding 'minen'. It then inflects like all other nouns ending with '-nen'.
For full details of how verbs are conjugated in Finnish, please refer to the Finnish verb conjugation article.
However, depending on the verb's stem type, assimilation can occur with the 'n' of the ending.
In type II verbs, the 'n' is assimilated to the consonant at the end of the stem:
There are two main ways of forming a question - either using a specific question word, or by adding a '-ko/kö' suffix to one of the words in a sentence. A question word is placed first in the sentence, and a word with the interrogative suffix is also moved to this position:
'mikä tämä on?' = 'what is this?'
'tämä on kirja' = 'this is a book'
'onko tämä kirja?' = 'is this a book?'
'tämäkö on kirja?' = 'is this a book?'
'kirjako tämä on?' = 'is this a book?'
'eikö tämä ole kirja?' = 'is this not a book?' (note the '-kö' goes on the negative verb)
=Adverbs=
A very common way of forming adverbs is by adding the ending '-sti' to the inflecting form of the corresponding adjective:
The most usual neutral order, however, is subject-verb-object:
Besides the word-order implications of turning a sentence into a question, there are some other circumstances where word-order is important:Plurals
There are three different 'plurals' in Finnish:
;Nominative plural: This is the 'general' form of the plural
;Following numbers: After numbers greater than one, the noun is put in the partitive singular.
;Inflected plural: this uses the stem of the partitive plural inflected with the same set of endings as for singular nouns.
As a combined example of plurals 'lintu on puussa' = 'the bird is in the tree' -> 'linnut ovat puissa' = 'the birds are in the trees'Inflection of pronouns
The personal pronouns are inflected in the same way as nouns, and can be found in most of the same cases as nouns. For example:
Noun/adjective stem types
Vowel stems
! MORE HEREConsonant stems
! MORE HERE-nen nouns
This is a very large class of words which includes common nouns (for example 'nainen' = 'woman'), many names, and many common adjectives. Adding -nen to a noun is a very productive mechanism for making adjectives ('muovi' = 'plastic' -> 'muovinen' = 'made of plastic'). It can also function as a diminutive ending.
Here are a few of the diminutive forms that are still in use:
The diminutive form mostly lives in surnames which are usually very old words to which most finns have forgotten the meaning. Some of the most common:
Occasionally such nouns become placenames. For example, there is a peninsula called "Neuvosenniemi" in one lake. "Neuvonen" means "a bit of advice/direction"; at this peninsula people rowing tar barrels across the lake would stop to ask whether the weather conditions would make it unsafe to continue to the other side.-e nouns
These nouns look as though they should behave like vowel stem nouns, but in fact behave like consonant stem nouns due to the historical loss of a final consonant. There are some common nouns in this class, for example 'huone' = 'room', 'kirje' = 'letter'
=Adjectives=
Adjectives in Finnish are inflected in exactly the same way as nouns, and an adjective must agree in number and case with the noun it is modifying.
And here are some examples of adjectives inflected to agree with nouns:
Notice that adjective undergo the same sorts of stem changes when they are inflected as nouns do.Comparative formation
The comparative of the adjective is formed by adding '-mpi' to the inflecting stem. For example:
Since the comparative adjective is still an adjective, it must be inflected to agree with the noun it modifies. To make the inflecting stem of the comparative, the '-mpi' ending loses its final 'i'. If the syllable context calls for a weak consonant, the '-mp-' becomes '-mm-'. Then '-a-' is added before the actual case ending. This should become clear with a few examples !Superlative formation
The superlative of the adjective is formed by adding '-in' to the inflecting stem. For example:
Note that because the superlative marker vowel is an 'i', the same kind of changes can occur with vowel stems as happen in verb imperfects, and noun inflecting plurals:
Since the superlative adjective is still an adjective, it must be inflected to agree with the noun it modifies. The '-in' becomes either '-imma-' or '-impa-' depending on whether the syllable context calls for a weak or strong consonant. Here are the examples:Irregular forms
The most important irregular form is:
(though I know from personal error that Finns understand 'hyvempi' :-)
There are a small number of other irregular comparative and superlative forms, such as:
=Postpositions and prepositions=
Postpositions are more common in Finnish than prepositions. Both postpositions and prepositions can be combined with either a noun or a possessive suffix to form a P-positional phrase. Postpositions
Postpositions indicate place, time, cause, consequence or relation.
In postpositional phrases the noun is usually in genitive:
The noun (or pronoun) can be omitted when there is a possessive suffix:Prepositions
There are few important prepositions in Finnish. In prepositional phrases the noun is always in partitive:
Some postpositions can also be used as prepositions:
=Verb forms=
Finnish verbs are usually divided into six groups depending on the stem type. All six types have the same set of endings, but the stems undergo (slightly) different changes when inflected.Tenses
Finnish verbs have present, imperfect, perfect and pluperfect tenses.Voices
Finnish has two possible verb voices: active and passive. The active voice corresponds with that of English, but the passive voice has some important differences.Passive voice
In fact, the Finnish passive would be better described as a "vaguely personal" form since there is no way of connecting the action performed with a particular agent and hence there is only one form of the passive. This should become clear through an example:Moods
Indicative
The indicative is the form of the verb used for making statements or asking simple questions. In the verb morphology sections, the mood referred to will be the indicative unless otherwise stated.Conditional
The conditional mood expresses the idea that the action or state expressed by the verb may or may not actually happen. As in English, the Finnish conditional is used in conditional sentences (e.g. "I would tell you if I knew") and in polite requests (e.g. "I would like some coffee").Imperative
The imperative mood is used to express commands. In Finnish, there is only one tense form (the present-future). The possible variants of Finnish imperatives are:
Active, 2nd person imperatives
These are the most common forms of the imperative: "Do this", "Don't do that".
To make this negative, 'älä' (which is the active imperative singular 2nd person of the negative verb) is placed before the positive form:
To form the plural, add '-kaa' or '-kää' to the verb's stem:
To make this negative, 'älkää' (which is the active imperative present plural 2nd person of the negation verb)is placed before the positive form and the suffix '-ko' or '-kö' is added to the verb stem:
Note that 2nd person plural imperatives can also be used as polite imperatives when referring to one person.Passive, 2nd person imperatives
3rd person imperatives
1st person plural imperatives
The 1st person imperative sounds archaic, and a form resembling the passive indicative is often used instead: 'mennään!' = 'let's go!'Optative
The optative mood is a variant of the imperative mood. It expresses hopes or wishes.
Potential
The potential mood is used to express that the action or state expressed by the verb is likely but not certain, and is rare in modern Finnish, especially in speech. The potential has no counterpart in English.
In some dialects 'tullee' ('may come') is an indicative form verb ('tulee' = 'comes') but grammatically it is a potential verb.Eventive
Infinitives
First infinitive
The first infinitive short form of a verb is the "dictionary entry" form. All first infinitive short forms end in a/ ä. This corresponds to the English 'to' form, for example:
The first infinitive long form is the translative plus a possessive suffix.
The first infinitive only has active form.Second infinitive
This corresponds to the English verbal noun (-ing form), and behaves as a noun in Finnish in that it can be inflected, but only in the inessive and the instructive. In the inessive it has both active and passive forms. The instructive has only active form. A possessive suffix can be added to the active inessive.
The second infinitive is relatively rare, especially in the spoken language, except in certain set phrases (for example 'toisin sanoen' = 'in other words').
;Active Inessive + Possessive Suffix (while themselves in the act of)
;Passive Inessive (when or while in the act of something being done)
;Active Instructive (by means of/ while in the act of)
Third infinitive
This corresponds to the English verbal noun (-ing form), and behaves as a noun in Finnish in that it can be inflected, but only in a limited number of cases. It is used to refer to a particular act or occasion of the verb's action.
;elative: 'lukemasta' = '(from just having been) reading'
;illative: 'lukemaan' = '(about to be / with the intention of) reading'
;adessive: 'lukemalla' = '(by) reading'
;abessive: 'lukematta' = '(without) reading'
A rare and archaic form of the third infinitive which occurs with the verb pitää:
;instructive: 'sinun ei pidä lukeman' = 'you must not read'
The third infinitive instructive is usually replaced with the first infinitive short form in modern Finnish.Fourth infinitive
This corresponds to the English verbal noun (-ing form), and behaves as a noun in Finnish in that it can be inflected. It is used to refer to the action of the verb in general.Fifth infinitive
This is a fairly rare form which has the meaning 'on the point of ...ing / just about to ...'Verb Conjugation
Participles
Finnish verbs have present and past participles, both with active and passive forms, and an 'agent' participle. Participles can be used in different ways than ordinary adjectives and they can have an object.Present participle, active
! MORE HEREPresent participle, passive
! MORE HEREPast participle, active
Basically this is formed by removing the infinitive ending and adding '-nut/nyt' (depending on vowel harmony). For example 'puhua' -> 'puhunut', 'syödä' -> 'syönyt'
In verbs of types IV-VI, the 't' at the end of the stem is assimilated to the 'n':
Past particple, passive
! MORE HEREAgent participle
The agent participle is formed in a similar way as the third infinitive (see above), adding -ma or -mä to the verb stem. It indicates something done by someone and can be inflected in all cases. The party performing the action is indicated by the use of genitive. For example:
Negation of verbs
Present indicative
Verbs are negated by using a 'negative verb' in front of the stem from the present tense (in its 'weak' consonant form):
;Singular
;Plural
Note that the inflection is on the negative verb, not on the main verb, and that the endings are regular apart from the 3rd person formsPresent passive
The negative is formed from the third-person singular "negative verb" - 'ei' - and the present passive with the final '-an' removed:
Imperfect indicative
The negative is formed from the appropriate part of the negative verb followed by the nominative form (either singular or plural depending on the number of the verb's subject) of the active past participle. So for 'puhua' the pattern is:
;Singular
;Plural
Note one exception: when the 'te' 2nd person plural form is used in an honorific way to address one person, the singular form of the participle is used: 'te ette puhunut' = 'you (s, polite) did not speak'Imperfect passive
The negative is formed from the third-person singular negative verb - 'ei' - and the nominative singular form of the passive present participle (compare this with the negative of the imperfect indicative):
Note that in the spoken language, this form is used for the first person plural. In this case, the personal pronoun is obligatory: 'me ei menty' = 'we did not go'Interrogatives (questions)
The great thing about adverbs is that because they are modifying verbs, not nouns, they don't inflect!Comparative formation
The comparative form of the adverb has the ending '-mmin'
Superlative formation
The superlative form of the adverb has the ending '-immin'.
Because of the '-i-', the stem vowel can change, similarly to superlative adjectives, or to avoid runs of three vowels:
Irregular forms
There are a number of irregular adverbs, including:
=Numbers=
Please refer to the separate numbers article for details of how numbers work in Finnish.
but this can be varied for emphasis:
and:
The last three are not quite as natural, and would normally be expressed using a longer sentence (or several sentences). 'Puri miestä koira' is also possible but sounds rather poetical.