Tahtojen

Tahtojen is the genitive plural form of tahto, a Finnish noun meaning will, intention, or wish. It marks possession or association with multiple wills and is used when discussing the desires or directives of more than one subject. A common fixed expression is tahtojen mukaan, meaning “according to the wills (desires).”

In ordinary Finnish, tahto denotes a person’s voluntary decision, determination, or preference. Tahtojen is used to talk about the will of several actors—such as a committee, a community, or a group of individuals—and is often found in formal, legal, or literary contexts where collective preference is important. The phrase tahtojen mukaan is typical in discussions of policy, ethics, or governance.

Over time, tahto has broadened to cover notions of personal agency and autonomy; tahtojen as a grammatical form preserves the sense of plurality in these discussions. The form appears in dictionaries and corpora of Finnish as the standard genitive plural.

See also: tahto.