Muotopääte

Muotopääte is a term used in Finnish grammar to describe the inflectional ending attached to a word stem to express grammatical meaning. It is usually a suffix and is the primary tool for signaling properties such as case, number, person, tense, mood, and possession. In Finnish, most inflectional information is carried by muotopäätteet rather than separate function words, making them central to word formation and syntax.

For nouns and pronouns, muotopäätteet indicate case and number. For example, the noun talo (house) takes endings to show different relations: talossa means “in the house” (inessive), while talon marks the genitive “of the house.” Possessive forms also use muotopäätteet, as in taloni meaning “my house.” Endings vary with vowel harmony and the stem’s phonology.

For verbs, muotopäätteet encode person and tense. Examples include suorasanan 1st person present forms such as kirjoitan (“I write”) and kirjoitamme (“we write”). Other endings denote 2nd or 3rd person, past and imperfect aspects, or conditional mood. Verbal endings interact with stem changes such as consonant gradation in some verb classes.

Muotopääte is also used with adjectives and pronouns to reflect agreement with the noun they modify, though Finnish features rich noun inflection that often governs syntax and meaning through these suffixes. The concept is widely used in descriptions of morphology, typology, and language learning, and it is a defining characteristic of Finnish’s suffix-based inflectional system.