Marginalinen

Marginalinen is a term occasionally encountered in Finnish-language texts as an adjective relating to margins or boundary areas. In standard Finnish, the more common form for this meaning is marginaalinen, which is widely used in economics, statistics, linguistics, and related fields.

In practice, marginalinen is relatively rare and is often considered a non-standard variant or a regional/translation artifact. Some writers may use marginalinen as a direct loanword form influenced by other languages or by the English word marginal, though such usage is not widely accepted in formal Finnish style guides. When precision is required, most Finnish texts favor marginaalinen to express marginal concepts.

Common contexts where the sense of marginal appears include economics and statistics, where marginal concepts describe edge cases or incremental changes, such as marginal cost or marginal revenue, and in distribution or margin analyses in statistics. In linguistics or textual analysis, related ideas involving margins or peripheral elements may be described with marginaali or marginaalinen rather than marginalinen.

Etymologically, marginalinen is linked to the Latin marginalis through various European languages, but in Finnish, the standard adjective is marginaalinen, derived from marginaali (margin). The preferred form reflects Finnish phonology and compounding conventions.

See also: marginaali, marginaalinen kustannus, marginaalinen arvo, marginalismi.

Note: Marginalinen is not widely recognized as a distinct, widely used Finnish term, and its presence is typically limited to non-standard, archaic, or translation-influenced contexts.