Genetive in the spoken Finnish

Hi alll!

The dreadful grammar cases. Am I right?

Today I'll teach you how to form the genetive in spoken Finnish, and for once I can tell you it's very easy! At least for the most part. I doubt you started to learn Finnish because it's such an easy language.

So, let's go.

Basically, you just use the possessive pronoun and add the noun. You should resemember though, that this only works in spoken language. In the standard Finnish you can drop the pronoun but you must add the genetive suffix.

First, let me show you how the genetive works in standard Finnish. As I'm writing this with a cup of coffee in front of me, let's use the word coffee ”kahvi” as an example. I'll use bold font for the suffixes.

Minun kahvini – My coffee

Sinun kahvisi – your coffee

Hänen/(sen) kahvinsa - his/her/(its) coffee

Meidän kahvimme - our coffee

Teidän kahvinne - your coffee

Heidän kahvinsa - their coffee

Because this is Finnish we're talking about, there has to be something confusing. Well, in this case, it's the dialects. I tried to research this, but I didn't get really useful results, so especially the plural pronouns are based on what I have heard people use. I have already written about the pronouns in the dialects, you can read it here.

So here we have the singular:

mä – mun mie – miun

sä – sun sie - siun

(hän) se – sen

Then the plural. Please, please correct me if I'm wrong somewhere. As far as I know, they're quite similar. Some (I believe southern) dialects would use the same forms as in the standard Finnish.

Me – meiän, meijän

te – teiän, teijän

he – heijän

ne – niihen, niiden

In the western dialects people tend to replace ds with r. I'm leaving ”ne” out because I can't remember ever hearing it in use.

Me – meirän

te – teirän

he – heirän

This specific feature can make some interesting situations. My roommate is from the southwestern part of the country and sometimes when she speaks about water cooker, (vedenkeitin) she says verenkeitin. That would translate as a blood cooker. Yeah. It did sound very weird to me too when I first heard it.

In some parts of the country the genetive would work something like this, I can't exactly point it on the map as I have heard it only a couple of times myself. Again, I have no idea what the genetive for ne would be, I haven't heard it anywhere.

me- meitin

te – teitin

he – heitin

I hope you're not too scared of the dialects, for the most part dropping the suffix is enough, I just thought that the differences in dialects might be interesting for you.