nimistömuodot

Nimistömuodot are the inflected forms of personal names in the Finnish language. Unlike many European languages that treat personal names as fixed nouns, Finnish typically adapts surnames and given names to match the grammatical case required by the sentence. This inflection is governed by the same rules as for common nouns: the name is declined in the nominative, genitive, partitive, accusative, essive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, abessive, comitative, and sometimes in the comparative or expressives. For example, the surname Virtanen is inflected as "Virtanen" in the nominative, "Virtasen" in the genitive, "Virtaneen" in the partitive, "Virtanensa" in the elative, and "Virtaneen" as partitive. Similarly, the given name Tapio can appear as "Tapio", "Tapion", "Tapiolle", "Tapion" in different cases.

The function of nimistömuodot is to reflect grammatical roles such as subject, object, possession, or location. In written Finnish, especially in formal and literary texts, strict inflection of names is common, whereas in casual conversations, speakers often omit inflection, treating names as indeclinable. Many minority languages within Finland have similar conventions. The spelling of the inflected form may change slightly for phonological reasons, but the root remains recognizable.

The practice of inflecting personal names demonstrates the deep integration of Finnish morphosyntactic norms with nominal categories. Studying nimistömuodot provides insight into historical phonology, cultural attitudes toward naming, and the interaction between identity and language structure.