Vastuutaan

Vastuutaan is a Finnish inflected form of the noun vastuu, meaning responsibility. It is used to indicate that the responsibility in question belongs to the subject personally, often in the third-person context. The form emphasizes personal accountability and can appear in sentences where someone bears, takes on, or fulfills duties.

In standard Finnish, vastuutaan commonly occurs with verbs such as kantaa (to bear), ottaa (to take), hoitaa (to handle), or vastuun ottaminen (taking on responsibility). Examples include hän kantaa vastuutaan (he/she bears his/her own responsibility) and kunta otti vastuutaan (the municipality took on its responsibilities). The construction aligns with Finnish possessive morphology, where ownership or association is marked within the noun phrase.

Vastuutaan can appear in a range of registers from neutral reporting to evaluative discourse, particularly in political, organizational, or legal contexts where accountability is discussed. It can serve to delineate personal culpability from collective or external responsibility, or to place emphasis on an individual’s or entity’s obligation to address outcomes.

Related terms include vastuu (responsibility), vastuullisuus (responsibility/accountability as a quality), and vastuuntunto (sense of duty). Understanding vastuutaan helps in parsing sentences that foreground personal accountability and in recognizing nuances between individual and collective responsibility in Finnish text.

See also: vastuu, vastuullisuus, vastuuntunto, vastuukysymys.