Finnish nominals, which include pronouns, adjectives, and numerals, are declined in a large number of grammatical cases, whose uses and meanings are detailed here.
Note regarding the examples: Finnish has no grammatical gender nor definite and indefinite articles.
Characteristic ending: -n possibly modified by consonant gradation: mäki → mäen, talo → talon.
published major Finnish grammar Iso suomen kielioppi takes a morphological point of view and does not list the accusative except for the personal pronouns and kuka, while at the same time acknowledging the argument for the traditional view.
The existence or nonexistence of an accusative case in Finnish thus depends on one's point of view.
However, in a similar way to verb imperfects, the '-i-' can cause changes to the final vowel of the stem, leading to an apparent diversity of forms.
However, they are also used in a range of syntactic constructions, much like prepositions in Indo-European languages (e.g. We're *at* school vs. We're good *at* math, in which only the first at has a locative meaning).
In Finnish, the suffix -lla as a locative means "on (top)", but may function to code the idea of "being used as an instrument", e.g. kirjoitan kynällä "I write with a pen" (lit.
The word in a locative case refers to the verb, for example, in Sovitan housuja ikkunassa the word ikkunassa "in the window" refers to the verb sovitan "I try on", not to the adjacent noun housuja "pants".
NB the consonant stem used to be quite common in the essive, and some nouns and adjectives still have this feature.
(Note that for months, the inessive case is used instead) Characteristic ending -ksi added to the weak vowel stem.
These can be classified according to a three-way contrast of entering, residing in, and exiting a state, and there are three different systems of these cases.