Hoidettavanaan

Hoidettavanaan is a Finnish grammatical form used to signal that something is the recipient of care, in contexts such as social welfare, healthcare, or child and elder care. The term is derived from the verb hoitaa, meaning “to care for,” and from the related participle stem hoidettava, meaning “the thing to be cared for.” In usage, hoidettavanaan expresses a relationship in which care is directed toward the subject, and its exact interpretation depends on the surrounding sentence and context. In English it is commonly translated as “to be cared for” or “in need of care,” though the precise sense can vary with tense, mood, and syntactic arrangement.

In practice, hoidettavanaan is most often encountered in written Finnish—legal texts, policy papers, and linguistic descriptions—where formal or precise expressions of care obligations or conditions are needed. It is less common in everyday speech, where simpler forms such as hoidettava (“the thing to be cared for”) or hoidettavana (“in care”) are typically used.

Related concepts in Finnish grammar include the base verb hoitaa, the participial form hoidettava, and the pejorative or evaluative layers that can appear when discussing care arrangements in society. The form is one example of how Finnish can encode relational meanings—such as care, obligation, and recipient status—through participial and case-like inflection.

See also: hoitaa, hoidettava, hoidettavana, Finnish grammar, care in law and policy.