The personal pronouns are the most frequent words in the language, and they are also mildly irregular, so they earn a reference page of their own. The good news is that once you get past three or four special forms, the pronouns take the ordinary case endings you already know. The forms worth real attention are the partitive (minua, häntä) and the special accusative (minut, hänet), because English gives you one object form ("me", "him") where Finnish gives you two, and choosing wrongly is the single most common pronoun error learners make.
The full personal-pronoun paradigm
Finnish has no grammatical gender: hän is "he" or "she", and (in careful register) refers only to people. Here are the six pronouns across the cases you use most often.
| Case | I | you (sg.) | he/she | we | you (pl.) | they |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | minä | sinä | hän | me | te | he |
| Genitive | minun | sinun | hänen | meidän | teidän | heidän |
| Accusative | minut | sinut | hänet | meidät | teidät | heidät |
| Partitive | minua | sinua | häntä | meitä | teitä | heitä |
| Inessive | minussa | sinussa | hänessä | meissä | teissä | heissä |
| Elative | minusta | sinusta | hänestä | meistä | teistä | heistä |
| Adessive | minulla | sinulla | hänellä | meillä | teillä | heillä |
| Ablative | minulta | sinulta | häneltä | meiltä | teiltä | heiltä |
| Allative | minulle | sinulle | hänelle | meille | teille | heille |
The local cases are perfectly regular — minulla is just minu- plus the adessive -lla, exactly as any noun would take it. So the pronouns enter ordinary sentences with no surprises:
Minulla on nälkä, mennäänkö syömään?
I'm hungry, shall we go and eat?
Mitä sinä ajattelet hänestä?
What do you think of him/her?
Anna se minulle, minä hoidan sen.
Give it to me, I'll take care of it.
The special accusative -t: minut, hänet, heidät
Nouns mark a total object with the genitive-shaped -n ending (Ostin auton "I bought the car"). The personal pronouns refuse to do this. They have a dedicated accusative ending -t instead, and you must use it wherever the whole person is the object of a completed action.
Näen sinut jo kaukaa tuolla mäellä.
I can see you already from far off on that hill.
Kutsuimme heidät illalliselle ensi lauantaina.
We invited them to dinner next Saturday.
Kuka vei minut kotiin eilen illalla?
Who took me home last night?
Sinut, heidät, minut — never sinun, heidän, minun — for the object. And the pronoun accusative has a real advantage over the noun: it is invariant. A noun object switches between the genitive form (Ostan auton) and the nominative form in imperatives and passives (Osta auto! "Buy the car!"). A pronoun keeps its -t accusative in every one of those environments:
Ota minut mukaan, älä jätä minua tänne!
Take me along, don't leave me here!
Even in the imperative ota ("take"), where a noun object would go nominative, the pronoun stays minut. That single stable -t form does the whole job.
The partitive object: minua, häntä, meitä
Now the other half of the puzzle. Many extremely common verbs — verbs of emotion, of ongoing or incomplete action, of "touching on" rather than "completing" — take a partitive object, and the pronouns have partitive forms for exactly this: minua, sinua, häntä, meitä, teitä, heitä.
Rakastan häntä enemmän kuin osaan sanoa.
I love him/her more than I can say.
Odota minua hetki, tulen ihan kohta.
Wait for me a moment, I'll come right away.
Miksi sinä katsot minua noin?
Why are you looking at me like that?
Rakastaa (love), odottaa (wait for), katsoa (look at), auttaa (help), kuunnella (listen to) all govern the partitive, so their pronoun objects are häntä, minua, sinua, never the accusative -t form. Which verbs take the partitive object and which take the total accusative is the deep topic of the object forms page and of the partitive-vs-accusative choice generally; here the essential fact is that these are three different forms with three different jobs:
| Form | Case | Job | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| hänen | Genitive | possessor ("his/her") | hänen autonsa (his car) |
| häntä | Partitive | partitive object | rakastan häntä (I love him) |
| hänet | Accusative | total object | näen hänet (I see him) |
The genitive hänen is never an object. Reserve it for "whose" — hänen kirjansa ("his book"), hänen mielestään ("in his opinion").
The demonstratives: tämä, tuo, se
The three demonstratives — tämä ("this", near me), tuo ("that", over there), se ("it / that", already known) — decline heavily and irregularly, and se is also the everyday word for "it". Their singular core forms:
| Case | this (tämä) | that (tuo) | it/that (se) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | tämä | tuo | se |
| Genitive | tämän | tuon | sen |
| Partitive | tätä | tuota | sitä |
| Inessive | tässä | tuossa | siinä |
| Elative | tästä | tuosta | siitä |
| Illative | tähän | tuohon | siihen |
| Adessive | tällä | tuolla | sillä |
| Allative | tälle | tuolle | sille |
| Plural nom. | nämä | nuo | ne |
Tämä on hyvä, mutta tuo tuolla on vielä parempi.
This one is good, but that one over there is even better.
Mitä sinä teet tällä? Se on aika painava.
What are you doing with this? It's pretty heavy.
Unlike the personal pronouns, the demonstratives take a genitive-shaped total object, just like nouns: Näen sen ("I see it"), Ostin nämä ("I bought these") — there is no -t accusative here. The plurals nämä / nuo / ne have their own irregular stems (näiden, noiden, niiden), set out in full on the demonstrative declension page.
A note on register
Everyday spoken Finnish reshapes these pronouns heavily. (informal / spoken): minä → mä, minun → mun, minua → mua, minut → mut; sinä → sä, sinut → sut; and colloquially hän → se and he → ne for people (se sano "he said"). These are ubiquitous in speech and messaging but do not belong in formal writing, where the full forms above are required.
Mä en tiiä, kysy siltä. (informal)
I dunno, ask him. (colloquial: siltä = 'from him', se used for a person)
Common Mistakes
❌ Rakastan hänet.
Incorrect — rakastaa takes a partitive object: rakastan häntä.
✅ Rakastan häntä.
I love him/her.
❌ Näen hänen tuolla.
Incorrect — the genitive is never an object; the total object of a pronoun is the -t accusative: hänet.
✅ Näen hänet tuolla.
I see him/her over there.
❌ Kutsuimme heidän juhliin.
Incorrect — 'invited them' is the accusative heidät, not the genitive heidän.
✅ Kutsuimme heidät juhliin.
We invited them to the party.
❌ Anna se minut.
Incorrect — 'to me' is the allative minulle; minut is the accusative object form.
✅ Anna se minulle.
Give it to me.
Key Takeaways
- The personal pronouns take regular local case endings (minulla, hänestä, meille); only a few forms are special.
- The total object of a personal pronoun is the dedicated accusative -t: minut, sinut, hänet, meidät, teidät, heidät — and it stays -t even in imperatives (ota minut).
- Partitive objects use minua, sinua, häntä, meitä, teitä, heitä — required by verbs like rakastaa, odottaa, katsoa.
- hänen (genitive), häntä (partitive), hänet (accusative) are three distinct forms; the genitive is never the object.
- Demonstratives tämä / tuo / se decline irregularly and take a noun-style genitive object (näen sen), not a -t accusative.
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Start learning Finnish→Related Topics
- Declining Personal Pronouns: minä → minua → minutA2 — The case forms of Finnish personal pronouns — genitive minun, partitive minua, the special accusative minut, and the local cases minulla, minulle.
- Object Pronoun Forms: minut, sinut, hänetA2 — Personal pronouns have a special total-object form in -t (minut, sinut, hänet) versus the partitive object (minua, häntä) — when to use each.
- Personal PronounsA1 — The six Finnish personal pronouns — minä, sinä, hän, me, te, he — with the genderless hän and why the subject pronoun is usually dropped.
- Cases and Adjective AgreementA2 — An attributive adjective copies its noun's case AND number exactly — isossa talossa, isoja taloja, punaiselle autolle — so every case ending appears twice.
- Declining Demonstratives: tämä, tuo, seB1 — The irregular case stems of tämä, tuo, se and the plurals nämä, nuo, ne — including the notorious si-/sii- stem of se.