eläviin

Eläviin is a Finnish grammatical form that functions as the illative plural of the adjective elävä, meaning living or alive. In Finnish, the illative case expresses movement toward or into something, and its plural variant is used with plural nouns. The form eläviin appears when the stem elävä combines with the plural illative suffix, producing a word that means “to the living” or “to living beings” in context.

Morphology and usage

Eläviin is not a standalone noun but a case-inflected form of the adjective elävä. The illative plural suffix is typically -iin or -ihin, depending on vowel harmony and the phonology of the stem; for elävä, the resulting form is eläviin. This form is used when describing destinations or targets of action that are plural and refer to living beings or things that are alive. For example, eläviin olentoihin means “to the living beings,” and phrases such as eläviin kohteisiin kohdistuva tutkimus would translate to “research directed at living targets.”

Context and prevalence

Eläviin occurs primarily in formal, philosophical, ethical, or scientific writing, where distinctions between living and non-living or between different groups of beings are important. In everyday speech, speakers more commonly use nouns like olennot or elävät instead of repeatedly employing the elävä-inflected forms in illative constructions.

Relation to related forms

Elävä serves as the base adjective meaning “living.” Other inflected forms include elävän (genitive), elävänä (essive), and elävissä (inessive), among others. The illative plural eläviin specifically marks direction toward multiple living entities within a sentence.

See also

Finnish grammar, illative case, elävä (living), noun-adjective agreement, philosophical terminology relating to life.