Finnish grammar

This article deals with the grammar of the Finnish language (the article Finnish language discusses the language in general and contains a quick overview of the grammar). For the ways in which the spoken language differs from the written language, see Colloquial Finnish. Unlike the languages spoken in neighbouring countries, such as Swedish and Norwegian, which are North Germanic languages, Finnish is a Uralic language, and is typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages.

The pronouns are inflected in the Finnish language much in the same way that their referent nouns are.

The personal pronouns are used to refer to human beings only. The personal pronouns in Finnish in the nominative case are listed in the following table:

Because Finnish verbs are inflected for person and number, subject pronouns are not required, and the first and second-person pronouns are usually omitted in standard Finnish except when used for emphasis. In spoken Finnish, all pronouns are generally used. In the third person, the pronoun is required: "hän menee" = he goes, "he menevät" = they go. This applies to both colloquial and written language.

In colloquial Finnish, the pronouns se and ne are very commonly used as the singular and plural third-person pronouns, respectively. Use of hän and he is mostly restricted to writing and formal or markedly polite speech. Minä and sinä are usually replaced with colloquial forms (the most common variants mä and sä, in some dialects mää and sää, mnää and snää or mie and sie). Me, te and he are short enough to lack reduced colloquial forms, and their variants are considered dialectal. Some common verbs, such as olla "to be" and tulla "to come", exhibit similar reduced colloquial forms:

In common with some other languages, the second-person plural can be used as a polite form when addressing one person; however, this usage is diminishing in Finnish society.

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