sijamuotoihin

Sijamuotoihin is a grammatical term in Finnish that refers to the set of case forms (sijamuodot) used to mark the roles and relations of nouns, pronouns and adjectives in a sentence. The word is the illative plural form of sijamuoto, literally meaning “into the grammatical cases” or “to the cases.” In discussions of Finnish grammar, sijamuotoihin is used to talk about the system as a whole or to refer to the illative plural ending -ihin that yields forms such as taloon in the singular and taloihin in the plural.

Finnish uses a rich system of taivutus (inflection) where a word changes its ending to indicate functions such as location, movement, possession and manner of state. Commonly taught cases include inessive (in), elative (out of), illative (into), adessive (on), ablative (from on), allative (onto), translative (into becoming), essive (as), abessive (without), genitive (of) and partitive (part of). The exact number of recognized cases can vary by grammar tradition, and some forms overlap in practice (for example, the accusative often blends with nominative or partitive endings). The illative plural form, as in sijamuotoihin, shows how plural taivutus can differ from singular, with suffixes like -iin or -ihin depending on the stem and vowel harmony.

In usage, sijamuotoihin may appear in explanations of how nouns take different endings to fit their syntactic role, or as a shorthand way to reference the whole system of case forms. It is a standard term in Finnish grammar discussions and language-learning materials. See also sijamuodot, Finnish grammar, inflection.