A lot of verbs, in Finnish as well as in English, have a derivate for the person doing the verb’s action. In English the ending for this is often -er (for example: to play → player). In Finnish, these are often words ending in -ja or -ija (or -jä and -ijä, according to the vowel harmoney rules).

The lists on this page are extremely limited, because there are hundreds of words ending in -ja/-ija. This page is meant to give you an idea of how these words are formed, as well as how they are inflected in all the different cases.

1. Words ending in -ja

Words ending in -ja/jä are derived from verbs by taking the strong stem of the verb (e.g. lentä- → lentäjä; korjaa- → korjaaja).

2. Words ending in -ija

When a word is derived from a verb which has a stem ending in -i or -e, you will get an -i- in front of the -ja/jä when deriving a noun from it (e.g. kokeile- → kokeilija; hallitse- → hallitsija).

3. Inflection of words ending in -ja and -ija

Words ending in -ja and -ija can both be inflected in all the Finnish cases. However, their plural inflection will be different.

In the plural, words ending in -ja will have the final -a replaced with the plural -i- (e.g. myyjä → myyjiä). Words ending in -ija will have the final -a replaced with -oi- (e.g. lukija → lukijoita).

4. Compound words ending in –ja or -ija

We can derive words ending in -ja/-ija from any verb in theory. However, the usefulness of these words on their own often isn’t very high. What, for example, would you do with the word “be-er” (from the verb “to be”) or “comer” (from the verb “to come”).

While these derivations on their own are near-useless, just looking at the word “comer” could bring to mind other nouns, such as “newcomer” and “homecomer”. We can make compound nouns like these in Finnish as well.

While this is the end of this article, there are hundreds more words ending in -ja/jä. There are also many more nouns that refer to a person, such as the ones in this article on nouns describing personality or behavior.

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