Virheitään

Virheitään is a Finnish grammatical form that expresses the idea of “their mistakes” or “their errors.” It is not a standalone concept but a word form built from virhe, meaning mistake, combined with the plural form virheet and a possessive suffix that marks third-person plural ownership. In usage, virheitään denotes that the mistakes belong to a group or to multiple people, depending on political or narrative context.

Morphology and syntax play a key role in how virheitään functions. The base noun virhe takes plural and partitive inflections in everyday Finnish, and the possessive suffix marks the owner. The resulting form virheitään therefore signals both plurality of the mistakes and that they belong to, or are attributed to, a group of people being discussed. The exact interpretation can depend on the surrounding pronouns or referents, such as jokaisen on tunnustettava virheitään (“everyone must acknowledge their own/their mistakes”) or Hän myönsi virheitään (“he/she admitted his/her/their mistakes”).

In discourse, virheitään appears in contexts involving accountability, reflection, or learning from errors. It can appear in educational texts, journalism, and literary prose whenever the author wishes to emphasize responsibility for multiple mistakes held by a person or group. The form is an example of Finnish’s rich system of inflection and possession, illustrating how plural objects and ownership are encoded within a single word.

See also: Finnish grammar, noun inflection, partitive case, possessive suffix, virhe.