käsitleva

Käsitleva is not a standard Finnish form. The widely accepted present active participle of the verb käsitellä meaning “to handle, to deal with, to treat” is käsittelevä. The two words are similar in spelling, but käsitleva is generally considered a misspelling or a nonstandard variant in Finnish.

Meaning and usage

Käsittelevä describes something that treats or deals with a subject. It functions as a present active participle adjective and is used mainly in attributive position before a noun, for example: käsittelevä tutkimus (a study that treats or analyzes), käsittelevä artikkeli (an article that treats the topic). It can also be declined like an adjective: käsittelevän artikkelin (genitive), käsittelevää artikkelia (partitive), and so on. The participle can convey the sense of addressing, examining, or analyzing a topic within the discourse.

Grammatical notes

As a present active participle, käsittelevä agrees in number and case with the noun it modifies. It is typically preferred in written Finnish for formal or descriptive contexts. The predicative use of a participle-like form is less common; phrases such as “artikkeli on käsittelevä” are unusual, and more natural constructions would use a finite verb or a noun phrase to express the same idea.

Related terms

Related concepts include käsittely (the act of handling or processing), käsittelijä (a handler or processor), and käsittelevä (the correct form of the participle). If encountering käsitleva, standard Finnish guidance is to replace it with käsittelevä unless the source explicitly documents a dialectal or nonstandard usage.