vieraslasteet

vieraslasteet is a Finnish term that refers to the great‑great‑grandchildren of an individual. The word is constructed from vieras, meaning "great" in the sense of "double great," and lasteet, the plural of laste, meaning "grandchild." Thus the term denotes the descendants four generations down from the person in question. In a genealogical context, a person's first generation of lasteet would be their grandchildren; the second generation from the original person would be great‑grandchildren; the third would be great‑great‑grandchildren, who are called vieraslasteet.

The use of vieraslasteet is largely confined to informal family conversation and to Finnish ancestry research. In many other languages there is no single word for this particular generation, and speakers usually say "great‑great‑grandchildren" or describe the relationship in compound phrases. The term exemplifies a broader trend in many Indo‑European languages, where a system of alternating augmentative prefixes (e.g., rarely used terms like avartaja in Finnish) is employed to denote progressively more distant relatives. Scholars of kinship who study the Finnish language pay attention to how such terms reflect the importance of lineage and lineage markers in Finnish society.

Although rencontre extant prehistoric texts do not record detailed uses of the term, nineteenth‑century Finnish genealogists frequently employed vieraslasteet in family tree records. Comparative studies of Scandinavian kinship terminology find similar patterns, indicating that the precise morphological construction of this word is a characteristic feature of Finnish verbal morphology. The term is also useful for clarifying relationships in contexts where inheritance rights or family titles are at stake, particularly in cases of extended family estates or hereditary titles.