This article has a very narrow focus; it only deals with the months of the year. If you’ve just started learning Finnish, you should focus on part 1 and 2 of this page and postpone learning the other expressions until a little later.

If you’ve advanced far enough, you may also want to learn more about other expressions of time, you can do so on our overview page of expressions of time. You should also check out our page on questions of time (e.g. Kuinka kauan? Mihin mennessä? Moneltako?). We also have separate pages about telling the time, the days of the week and the years.

1. January – In January

Below, you can find both the basic form of the months and the inessive form (-ssa), which is used to express that something happens in or during a month. Notice in the table below that the months do not start with a capital letter in Finnish!

Most of the names of the months actually mean something in Finnish. Some of the words that these months are based on aren’t used at all anymore in present-day Finnish, but other are still clearly recognizable. For example, kesäkuu literally means “summer moon” and joulukuu means “christmas moon”.

2. From January – Until January

If you want to express a timespan by saying during which month something began and when it ended, you can use the elative (-sta) and the illative (mihin) for this purpose. This way, you can express, for example, that you’re working from January until June (Olen töissä tammikuusta kesäkuuhun).

3. Using Adverbs: Starting from January

In addition to being able to express between which months something takes place, we can use the forms above also in combination with certain adverbs. The words lähtien and alkaen can be used to express the starting month of the action, in combination with the mistä-form. Likewise, the word asti can be used to express the last month of the period, in combination with the mihin-form. Lastly, you can use the word mennessä to express by when (by what month) something has to be finished.

4. Kuussa: Last Month – Next month

It is often also useful to be able to express that something will take place next month. For these kind of sentences, we use “tässä kuussa”, “viime kuussa” and “ensi kuussa”. Please note that it is not viime kuukausi or viime kuukaudessa. Learners of Finnish make a lot of mistakes with this.

The form “kuussa” is also used to say how often (how many times) something happens during a month (once a month, twice a month, etc).

5. Kuukausi Sitten – Kuukauden Päästä

Next, let’s take a look at how to express that something happened a month ago or will happen a month from now. Both of these constructions are very different from each other.

“Sitten” refers to the past, and will be located behind the time span in the sentence. When something happened a month ago, you will say “kuukausi sitten”. Please be careful to avoid saying “yksi kuukausi sitten”, because the “yksi” is clear from the form already. For two, three, four months, you will use the partitive, because that’s the form you use after a number.

“Päästä” and “kuluttua” refer to the future and will also be located behind the time span in the sentence. However, these two words are postpositions (look at 2.3. on that page), which means that the time span will be inflected in the genitive case. Again, avoid using “yksi” when saying “kuukauden päästä” or “kuukauden kuluttua”. When you’re using a larger number, you will have to inflect that number in the genitive with these two postpoisitions.

6. Some Random Sentences

What follows are just some random sentences using the things you can learn higher up on this page. You could perhaps cover up the Finnish side of the table and try to construct the sentences yourself!

Related posts:

Telling the Time in Finnish: Mitä kello on? Telling the Date – Monesko? Expressions of Time – Ajanilmaukset Timespans – Mistä Mihin – From when until when