Lukumäärällisten

Lukumäärällisten is a Finnish grammatical form that refers to plural entities described as having a numerical or quantitative value. The word originates from lukumäärä, meaning a count or numerical quantity, combined with the adjectival suffix –inen, which translates to “quantitative” or “numerical.” In everyday Finnish usage, lukumäärälliset (the correct adjectival form) describes variables, measures, or factors that can be expressed in numbers, as opposed to categorical or qualitative aspects.

The form appears in several fields that deal with numeric data. In mathematics and statistics, analysts talk about lukumäärällisten muuttujien, i.e., quantitative variables such as height, weight, or test scores. When describing surveys, pollsters distinguish between lukumäärällisiä ja nimitysmuotoisia kysymyksiä—numerical questions versus categorical choices. In linguistics, the term applies to phonetic measures that can be quantitated, such as duration and intensity of speech sounds.

Language resources like the Finnish National Corpus provide examples of lukumäärällisten usage, often found in scientific articles, technical manuals, and educational textbooks. Dictionaries define lukumäärä as a countable entity, while the adjective lukumääräinen indicates a property of being measurable by number. The plural form lukumäärällisten thus marks a group of such measurable items or characteristics within a given context.