Sanarakenteen

Sanarakenteen (the word structure) refers to the internal composition of a word in Finnish linguistics: how its meaning and grammatical function are built from smaller units called morphemes. A word’s basic skeleton is a stem or root, to which derivational affixes may be attached to create new word classes, and inflectional suffixes indicate case, number, tense, mood, and other grammatical categories. Many Finnish words also form through compounding of two or more stems.

Finnish is commonly described as agglutinative: most grammatical information is expressed by attaching suffixes in a chain. Derivational morphemes expand vocabulary and shift grammatical category, whereas inflectional endings encode features such as location, possession, or agreement. Multiple morphemes can accumulate on a single word; for example, talo (house) + ssa (inessive) yields talossa, and talo + ssa + kin yields talossakin, meaning “in the house as well.”

For linguists and language technologies, analyzing sanarakenteen means identifying each morpheme and its function, and determining the word’s lemma. This analysis supports dictionaries, language teaching, and natural language processing tools such as morphological analyzers or lemmatizers, which are essential for Finnish due to its extensive inflection and compounding.