loppusanoja

Loppusanoja is a Finnish linguistics term referring to the suffix morphemes that attach to the end of a word to express grammatical information or to derive new words. In Finnish, the word-form system is highly suffixing (agglutinative); a stem may bear several endings in sequence, producing forms that reflect different combinations of case, number, person, mood, or lexical category. The suffixes themselves are often called loppupäätteet or simply päätteet.

Finnish endings are divided into inflectional endings, which signal grammatical categories such as case (for example nominative, genitive, partitive, inessive, elative, illative, etc.), number (singular or plural), and possessive, and derivational endings, which create new words or change word class. An example chain with talo (house) shows how endings accumulate: talo (base) -> talon (genitive) -> talossa (inessive) -> talossani (in my house). The typical order is stem + case ending + possessive ending, though derivational endings may appear adjacent to the stem before inflectional ones.

Loppusanoja are used across parts of speech; verbs take endings indicating person and tense (puhun, puhuit), nouns take multiple case and possessive endings, and adjectives can bear participial or comparative endings. The system is productive and central to Finnish grammar, and understanding loppusanoja is essential for parsing sentences and producing correct, idiomatic forms.