Samankaltaan

Samankaltaan is a Finnish inflected form of the adjective samankaltainen, which means similar or of a similar kind. In Finnish, adjectives decline to reflect grammatical case, number, and other syntactic relationships, and samankaltaan represents one of those inflected forms within the -ainen class of adjectives. The form appears in descriptive grammar and language-learning resources as part of outlining how Finnish adjectives shift across cases.

The underlying root samankalta- conveys the sense of similarity, and the suffix -ainen marks the adjective class. The related noun samankaltaisuus denotes the concept of similarity, from which the adjective samankaltainen and its inflected forms, including samankaltaan, are derived. As with other inflected forms, samankaltaan cannot be fully understood in isolation; its exact usage depends on the word it modifies and the grammatical case dictated by the sentence structure.

In modern standard Finnish, samankaltaan is more likely to be encountered in formal writing, linguistic descriptions, or teaching contexts where the full paradigm of -ainen adjectives is explained. In everyday speech, speakers typically rely on more common endings such as samankaltainen or samankaltaista, depending on the syntactic role of the phrase.

See also: samankaltaisuus, samankaltainen, Finnish grammar, adjective inflection.