Kasvivat

Kasvivat is a Finnish verb form that appears primarily in historical or regional dialect usage. In contemporary standard Finnish, the common past tense third-person plural form of the verb kasvaa “to grow” is kasvoivat. Therefore, kasvivat is typically described as archaic or dialectal and is not routinely used in modern everyday language.

Etymology and form. Kasvivat is associated with the same verb root kasva- as the modern kasvaa. In certain older texts or regional varieties, nonstandard inflectional patterns produced forms that resemble kasvivat. Because Finnish verb conjugation has shifted over time and varies across dialects, kasvivat does not align with the modern standard system in a uniform way. As a result, it is mainly encountered in historical writing, folk speech, or careful reproductions of older language.

Usage and occurrence. Kasvivat may be found in 16th–19th-century Finnish literature, poetry, or transcriptions of regional speech. It is less common in late 19th- and 20th-century prose, where standard forms like kasvoivat became dominant. Today, estuv even in dialect writing, kasvoivat remains the accepted past tense form in standard Finnish, while kasvivat serves primarily as a diachronic or dialectal reference.

See also. Kasvaa, kasvu, Finnish verb conjugation, historical Finnish language.

References. For further details on historical Finnish inflection and dialectal variation, consult general Finnish grammar resources and corpora of older Finnish texts.