ABSTRACT
The grammar followed in this chapter is to some extent a different survey of spoken Finnish, based in large part on the case structure of the language. It presents an overview of the main characteristics of the language. This chapter provides information of a more detailed nature on specific topics: the context-sensitive use of cases, verb conjugation, and other words and their relations, namely adpositions and conjunctions. Since Finnish is an SVO language, the customary position for the subject is at the beginning of the sentence. Personal pronouns are not essential in a fully inflected language such as Finnish, since the first person singular suffix. The inflectional elements in Finnish are generally bound morphemes. The bound morphemes formed syllables of their own in about a half of the cases recorded before the age of 2 years, and it was only among the 2-year-olds that the proportion of syllable-forming suffixes increased to over 75 percent.
