kasvattavat

Kasvattavat is a Finnish word formed from the verb kasvattaa, which means to raise, grow, cultivate, or educate. In its common finite usage, kasvattavat is the third-person plural present indicative form, corresponding to the English “they raise” or “they are raising.” It is used to describe actions carried out by multiple subjects that cause growth, breeding, or development.

In everyday Finnish, kasvattavat appears in sentences where a plural subject performs the raising or cultivating action. Examples include: He kasvattavat lapsia. Yritykset kasvattavat henkilöstöään. Kasvattavat taimet tarvitsevat valoa. The form thus functions as a plain present-tense verb for a plural subject, and can describe parenting, farming, education, or cultivation contexts.

The word also has a present active participle form, used when describing ongoing activity in a plural sense. As a participle, kasvattavat can modify plural nouns or act in set phrases to denote entities that are involved in raising or cultivating. This usage is less common in everyday speech but appears in more descriptive or literary Finnish.

Etymology: kasvattava derives from kasv- (grow) with the causative suffix -attaa in kasvattaa, yielding a root sense of “to cause to grow” and its various inflected forms, including kasvattavat for plural subject agreement.

Related terms include kasvatus (growth, upbringing, education), kasvattaja (breeder, raiser, educator), and kasvatustiede (pedagogy, the science of education). Kasvattavat is thus a versatile form tied to processes of growth, development, and nurturing across personal, agricultural, and educational domains.