metsassa

Metsä is the Finnish noun for forest or woods. Metsässä is its inessive form, meaning “in the forest” or “inside the forest.” This form is used to indicate a static location within a forest in Finnish sentences.

Formation and grammar: Finnish uses the inessive suffix -ssä (or -ssa after back vowels). Because metsä ends with the front vowel ä, the correct suffix is -ssä, giving metsässä. The construction is a standard example of Finnish vowel harmony and agglutinative morphology.

Usage and examples: An example sentence is Kissa on metsässä, meaning “The cat is in the forest.” The corresponding directional form is metsään, used to express movement toward a forest, as in Mennään metsään (“We are going into the forest”). The inessive form can also appear in compound phrases describing location, such as metsän reunalla meaning “at the edge of the forest.”

Context: Forests are a central feature of Finnish geography and culture, appearing in everyday speech, literature, and folklore. The word metsässä is a common, neutral term used in education, maps, nature descriptions, and travel discourse.

See also: Finnish language; Inessive case; Metsä.