This page is built on the assumption that you have studied the names of common places in a city already (e.g. park, church, garden or station). In this article, we will be looking at how to use the location cases (missä mistä mihin).

This article does not discuss how place names are inflected in the cases (e.g. Tampereella vs Helsingissä). It also doesn’t explain any of the uses of the location cases in more abstract situations (such as how the verb tykätä requires –sta). We’re purely looking at places in and around the city.

1. Location Cases

Location cases tell you something about the location of something. Finnish has 6 location cases:

The case is the grammatical name for the case. The term is what the case will be called in immigrant Finnish lessons and some course books. If your goal is to learn to speak, write or understand Finnish, you don’t need the grammatical terms. Don’t break your head over trying to memorize them!

2. Missä? – Where?

When asking for the location of someone, we can ask Missä sinä olet? “Where are you?” and for the location of things, we can ask Missä se on? “Where is it?”. The missä question word is used to ask for the static location of something.

2.1 General Rule

When we answer a missä question, we will generally have to pick one of two cases: either the inessive (-ssA) or the adessive (-llA). The capital A is used to express that we can have both -a and -ä in these case endings, as vowel harmony rules require.

The general rule is that when you’re inside a building, you use the ending -ssA. When you’re at a place, out in the open air, you’ll use -llA. Read on below the table to learn more about the problems of this general rule.

2.2. How to know when to use -ssA or -llA

The examples in the table should quickly make you doubt the rule that –ssA is used when inside a building and –llA for when you’re out in the open air. This is definitely not a perfect rule.

For example: Metsä (forest) and puisto (park) are both out in the open air, but will become metsässä and puistossa. Maybe because the trees form a “roof” over your head?

A better approach to which words use –llA is to just learn these words by heart as exceptions. Most words will get –ssA, so you could use this ending as the default when answering the question missä. The ending –llA will be used:

There are some exceptional and/or interesting cases of the opposition between these two cases.

3. Missä Mistä Mihin

As mentioned above, Finnish has 6 location cases. Above, we’ve only looked at two: the –ssA and –llA forms. Both of those refer to a static location.

In addition, Finnish has a separate case that refers to movement towards a location, as well as a case for movement away from a location. This means that “in the store”, “to the store” and “from the store” will all require a different case.

3.1. Inner location cases: -ssa, -sta, S-mihin

3.2. Outer location cases: -lla, -lta, -lle

When you know that a word like asema will get –lla when we answer the question “where”, you automatically also know what the answer to the questions “from where” (mistä?) and “to where” (mihin?) will look like.

For example, the word for bus stop, pysäkki becomes pysäkillä, so we know that the other location cases will be pysäkiltä and pysäkille. We can’t mix the inner and outer location cases, so pysäkistä isn’t possible.

That’s it for “missä mistä mihin” for now. You could check out the article we have separately on each location case next:

Related posts:

The Ablative Case (Miltä) – Finnish Grammar The Inflection of Postpositions – Finnish Grammar Finnish Question Words – Interrogative Pronouns Existential Sentences – Jossain on jotain