Metsään

Metsän is the genitive singular form of the Finnish noun metsä, meaning forest. It denotes possession or association and translates roughly as “of the forest” or “the forest’s” in English. It is not used as a standalone base form; its function appears in grammatical constructions that require the genitive case.

In contemporary Finnish, metsän appears in two main roles. First, as the possessive form within noun phrases, for example metsän omistajat meaning “the owners of the forest,” or metsän reunat meaning “the edges of the forest.” Second, as the first element in compound nouns that express a relation to a forest, such as metsänhoito meaning “forest management.” These compounds are written as a single word, with metsän functioning as the genitive-linked head.

The form metsän is part of the broader Finnish genitive system, where the genitive singular of -ä nouns is typically formed by adding -n to the stem. For metsä, this yields metsän. The corresponding possessive forms such as metsänsä (his/her/its forest) show how the noun can carry both genitive and personal endings in a single word.

Etymologically, metsä belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family and is related to cognates in other Finnic languages, such as Estonian mets. The genitive form metsän reflects historical inflectional patterns shared across Finnic languages.