Adverbs of intensity are “intensifiers”. They usually make adjectives stronger, although they can also make them milder. In Finnish, you can call them intensiteettiadverbit, vahvistussanat or astemääritteet.

If you’re interested in a different kind of adverbs, you can find those here.

1. The Subjectivity of Adverbs of Intensity

With adverbs of intensity, you give color to a text: it’s a different thing to say that the party was fun (hauska), pretty fun (ihan hauska), really fun (todella hauska) or terribly fun (aivan hirveän hauska).

Adverbs of intensity are subjective. Something can in the eyes of one person be aika fiksu (pretty smart), while it’s tosi fiksu (really smart) in the eyes of another.

Let’s first look at what these intensivity adverbs look like morphologically. After that, they will be divided in groups based on their meaning and intensity.

2. Adverbs Organized by Morphology

Many of these adverbs are particles: words that don’t inflect at all (e.g. aika, melko, erittäin, ihan, oikein, sangen).

There is also a large group that are morphologically speaking the genitive form of an adjective. Very often, this adjective will have a negative meaning on its own, while its genitive form is usually used to express a positive quantity. Some examples are törkeän, helvetin, kauhean, hirveän, sairaan and kamalan (which all mean “very”).

Another group of genitive-based adverbs are adjectives ending in -ton (-ttoman in the genitive). Some examples of this are tavattoman, uskomattoman, suhteettoman, älyttömän and kohtuuttoman (you can find their meanings and examples further below).

3. Adverbs Organized by Strength

3.1. Fairly Weak Intensitivity Adverbs

There is a group of intensitivity adverbs that express that the quality of their main word isn’t all that strong. They can downplay or understate the meaning of the adjective, or just express that it’s not all that much. These usually appear in positive sentences.

Marked in green are the ones you might want to focus on as a beginner.

3.2. Negative Intensitivity Adverbs

The following adverbs are almost exclusively used in negative sentences. They make a negative statement milder.

3.3. Strengthening Intensitivity Adverbs

These adverbs strengthen the meaning of the adjective they define. They’re likely to appear in affirmative sentences, but can usually also be used in negative sentence. These can generally strengthen both negative and positive qualities.

3.4. Prefix Modifiers Expressing Intensity

You can express intensity with a fixed marker (alkumäärite) as well. This is limited to certain adjectives only, e.g. rutikuiva (super dry), ypöyksin (all alone) and täpötäysi (overcrowded).

You can find more examples of this on our page of adjectives with fixed modifiers.

4. Limitations

4.1. Context (collocations)

Not all adverbs of intensity can appear in all contexts. Some adverbs (e.g. tyystin) usually appear in negative sentences, while others (e.g. oikein) mostly appear in affirmative sentences. In addition, there are also many adverbs that can appear in both types of sentences and with both positive and negative qualities.

4.2. Polarity “vähän valmis”

One way to divide adjectives is whether they are polaric or not. A polaric adjective describes something that you either have or not have. For example, valmis (ready) is a polaric adjective: you’re either ready or not; you can’t be “a little ready” or “very ready”. Thus, all the adverbs on this page only work with SOME adjectives. Below are some examples of adjectives that can’t get an adverb of intensity.

4.3. Ihan and aivan

These two adverbs are interesting because Finnish language learners make a lot of mistakes with them. There are several reasons for this. For one, the adverbs ihan and aivan will make the meaning of positive adjectives weaker, but make the meaning of negative adjectives stronger. For example ihan hyvä means “fairly good”, while ihan hirveä means “really bad”.

If you would like to learn more about these words, you could check out this blog.

5. Example Sentences

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