tilassa

Tilassa is the inessive form of the Finnish noun tila, which can mean space, place, room, or a state/condition. As a grammatical form, tilassa expresses the sense of being “in” something, either physically inside a location or metaphorically in a certain state.

The word is formed from tila with the inessive suffix -ssa (or -ssä after vowel harmony). This suffix marks location or state from the perspective of being contained within or immersed in something. In practice, tilassa belongs to a broader set of Finnish cases used to describe where something is or in what condition it exists.

In terms of meaning, tilassa can describe a physical containment or location, but it is more often used when the focus is on state or condition rather than precise spatial details. For concrete places, Finnish typically uses specific place nouns with the corresponding case endings (for example kahvilassa for “in the cafe,” huoneessa for “in the room”). Tilassa tends to emphasize interiority, circumstances, or situation, and it appears in more formal or abstract constructions and fixed phrases.

Common contrasts include using other locative forms to express location in a specific place, while tilassa foregrounds being within a state or condition. The term is part of Finnish morphology and is related to broader discussions of how Finnish encodes space and state through cases.

See also: tila, Finnish grammar, inessive case.