välilläen

välilläen is a lexical item that appears in several Finno‑Ugric languages, particularly in Finno‑Sami dialects of Northern Finland and Sweden. The word is generally understood to mean “between” or “intermittently”, and it functions as a preposition or conjunction in these contexts. In contemporary Finnish Standard (which does not include "välilläen" as a formal term), its closest equivalent is välillä, meaning "in the interval of" or "midway between".

The term has an agglutinative morphology typical of Uralic languages. The base root (väl‑) conveys the idea of a span or interval, while the suffix –läen marks a modifier that localizes the action temporally or spatially. In many dialect regions the sound sequence /ä/ is realized with a front vowel, giving the distinctive “ä” in the root and the final „en” that signals a relational form. Similar patterns are seen in Sámi languages, where prefixes and suffixes regularly modify spatial or temporal relations.

Although not officially recognized in the Finnish dictionary, "välilläen" occurs in oral literature and folk songs. Its usage often describes circumstances where events occur during open periods or at transitional moments. For example, a speaker might say "Se tapahtui välilläen uutisen jälkeen" (It happened in between the news report and the following announcement). In such sentences the verb expresses an action that is temporally encapsulated by the preposition.

Scholars of Finno‑Ugric linguistics note that "välilläen" reflects a broader pattern of prepositional innovation that has arisen in border‑language areas where multiple language families intersect. The word has therefore gained a degree of prestige among linguistic anthropologists studying language contact. In English comparative studies of prepositions, "välilläen" is often cited alongside other Uralic prepositions that show similar interval semantics.

Overall, "välilläen" illustrates how small morphological changes can generate distinct lexical items that carry nuanced temporal or spatial meanings within related languages. The term remains mainly a spoken construction and does not yet appear in standard written registers.