Finnishnoun

Finnish noun is a grammatical category in the Finnish language. Finnish nouns are characterized by their lack of grammatical gender, unlike many other Indo-European languages. This means there are no inherent masculine, feminine, or neuter distinctions for nouns. Instead, Finnish nouns inflect for a variety of grammatical cases.

The case system in Finnish is extensive, with typically around 15 cases. These cases indicate the grammatical function of the noun within a sentence, such as subject, object, or location. For example, the nominative case is used for the subject, while the accusative case is used for the direct object. Other cases include the genitive, partitive, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, translative, essive, and instructive. Each case has its own distinct endings that are added to the noun stem.

Number is another important inflection for Finnish nouns. Nouns can be singular or plural. The plural is also marked by specific endings. Agreement in number is important, with verbs and adjectives also agreeing with the noun in number.

Another feature of Finnish nouns is their ability to form compound words. Finnish is an agglutinative language, which allows for the creation of long, complex words by adding suffixes and combining stems. This means that a single compound noun can express a concept that might require a phrase in another language. For instance, 'rautatieasema' combines 'rautatie' (railway) and 'asema' (station) to mean 'train station'.