Säällä

Sällä is a form found in Finnish that some linguistic descriptions treat as the adessive case of the noun sää, meaning weather. It denotes a location or state related to weather and can be interpreted roughly as “on the weather” or “in the weather.” In standard Finnish grammar, the adessive suffix -llä attaches to a noun, but with the word sää the surface form can appear as säällä or säillä, depending on dialect or historical spelling. In everyday use, the form sällä is more commonly encountered than a standalone form written as sähä or similar variants, and many writers prefer periphrastic expressions such as “säätiloissa” (in weather conditions) for clarity.

Etymology and form: The word is built from sää (weather) plus the adessive suffix -llä, reflecting common Finnic patterns of case marking. The exact orthography of the surface form has varied over time and across dialects, leading to multiple spellings in older texts and regional speech.

Usage: Säillä appears mainly in fixed expressions, colloquial speech, or poetic contexts rather than in formal prose. It is not a widely productive standalone unit in contemporary standard Finnish, where speakers typically describe weather using the base noun plus adjectives or compound nouns; for example, one would more likely use expressions that describe weather conditions or climate rather than relying on a solitary adessive form.

See also: sää (weather), Finnish grammar, adessive case, Finnish inflection patterns.

References: General Finnish grammar references and dictionaries discuss the adessive forms of nominal stems and note regional/spelling variation for words like sää.