muutamaan

Muutamaan is a Finnish inflected form of the determiner and numeral muutama, which means “a few” or “several.” It is used to refer to a small, approximate quantity and to connect that quantity to a noun in a specific grammatical case. In Finnish, numerals and adjectives decline to express number and case, and muutamaan is one of the inflected variants that can modify a noun in contexts that imply movement toward or distribution into a small number of items, or when the quantity is being categorized into several groups. The exact interpretation depends on the accompanying noun’s case.

In practice, muutamaan often appears in formal or written Finnish, including descriptive prose and reports, and is less common in casual speech where speakers may prefer simpler constructions such as using the base form muutama with the noun bearing the appropriate case ending. The word shares its basic meaning with other forms of muutama—the sense of “a few” or “several”—while the case form determines its syntactic role in the sentence.

The relationship between muutamaan and other Finnish numerals is typical of the language’s numeral system: the meaning centers on a non-specific small quantity, while the surrounding case and noun provide precise grammatical and semantic function. Etymologically, it arises from the base muutama with an inflectional ending that marks its role in the sentence rather than altering the core meaning of “a few.”

See also: muutama, Finnish numerals, Finnish grammar.