koirissa

Koirissa is the inessive plural form of the Finnish noun koira, meaning “dog”. In Finnish, nouns are inflected for case and number, and the inessive case denotes location “in” or “inside”. The singular inessive of koira is koirassa (“in the dog”), while koirissa (“in the dogs”) is used when referring to multiple canines.

The word is formed by adding the inessive suffix –ssa to the plural stem koir‑, which itself is created by attaching the plural marker –t to the nominative koira. This morphological process results in koir‑t‑ssa, simplified to koirissa. The form follows the regular phonological rules of Finnish, where the final consonant of the stem is retained before the case ending.

Koirissa is employed in everyday speech and writing to describe situations where dogs are inside a space, such as “Koirat leikkivät puistossa, kun koirissa nukkumaan menossa on kylmä” (“The dogs are playing in the park, while it is cold for the dogs going to sleep”). It can also appear in figurative contexts, for example in idioms describing group behavior or collective characteristics of dogs.

In linguistic studies, koirissa illustrates the interaction of pluralization and case marking in agglutinative languages. Its analysis contributes to understanding Finnish syntax, morphology, and the way spatial relations are expressed through inflection.