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Concept
Finnish grammar
Summary
The Finnish language is spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns elsewhere. Unlike the languages spoken in neighbouring countries, such as Swedish and Norwegian, which are North Germanic languages, or Russian, which is a Slavic language, Finnish is a Uralic language of the Finnic languages group. Typologically, Finnish is agglutinative. As in some other Uralic languages, Finnish has vowel harmony, and like other Finnic languages, it has consonant gradation.
The pronouns are inflected in the Finnish language much in the same way that their referent nouns are.
⠀⠀Personal pronouns are used to refer to human beings only. The personal pronouns in Finnish in the nominative case are listed in the following table:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
|+ Personal pronouns
|-
! Finnish !! English
|-
! colspan="2" style="background:#efefef;" | Singular
|-
|minä || I
|-
|sinä || you
|-
|hän || he/she
|-
! colspan="2" style="background:#efefef;" | Plural
|-
|me || we
|-
|te || you
|-
|he || they
|-
! colspan="2" style="background:#efefef;" | Polite
|-
|Te || you
|}
Because Finnish verbs are inflected for person and number, in the Finnish standard language subject pronouns are not required, and the first and second-person pronouns are usually omitted except when used for emphasis. In the third person, however, the pronoun is required: hän menee '(s)he goes', he menevät 'they go'. In spoken Finnish, all pronouns are generally used, even without emphatic meaning.
In colloquial Finnish, the inanimate pronouns se and ne are very commonly used in place of the singular and plural animate third-person pronouns, respectively. Use of hän and he is mostly restricted to writing and formal or markedly polite speech as this clear distinction has never occurred naturally in the language. Do note the animals are marked as less animate and are therefore never referred to as hän or he. Minä and sinä are usually replaced with colloquial forms. The most common variants are mä and sä, though, in some dialects mää and sää, mnää and snää or mie and sie are used.
Official source
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