Declining Personal Pronouns: minä → minua → minut

Finnish pronouns, like Finnish nouns, change their ending for every case — but they do it with irregular stems you have to learn as a set. The good news is that there are only six pronouns, and once you know the pattern for minä the others follow. This page gives you the full reference table plus the three forms you will use every single day: the genitive (minun, "my/of me"), the partitive (minua, "me"), and the special accusative (minut, "me").

The four core forms of minä

Before the big table, burn this four-way strip into memory — it is the backbone of the whole system:

The full reference table

Here is every common case for all six pronouns. The local cases (the last four rows) are perfectly regular once you know the stem; the top rows are the ones worth memorising outright.

Vowel harmony is split across the set

Look closely at the endings and you will spot something odd. minä and sinä are spelled with front ä, but their case forms take back-vowel endings: minua, minulla, minussa. Meanwhile hän stays fully front (häntä, hänellä, hänessä), and me / te / he are front too (meitä, teillä, heissä).

The reason is that minä and sinä have a hidden back-vowel stem, minu- / sinu-, left over from an older form. This is a genuine irregularity — there is no logic to shortcut it, so simply learn minua (back) against häntä (front) as fixed pairs. See vowel harmony for the general rule these pronouns break.

The genitive: possession and much more

The genitive (minun, sinun, hänen…) is your "my, your, his/her." In careful Finnish it usually pairs with a possessive suffix on the noun: minun autoni ("my car"). It also marks the subject of "must" sentences.

Partitive vs. accusative: minua or minut?

This is the choice English never makes, because English uses one object form ("me") for everything. Finnish splits the object in two by aspect — whether the action is partial/ongoing or whole/completed.

• Partitive (minua, sinua, häntä…) — the action is unbounded, ongoing, or the verb inherently takes a partitive object (like rakastaa, "to love", or katsoa, "to watch").
• Accusative (minut, sinut, hänet…) — the action affects the whole object and reaches a result: näki minut ("saw me — the whole of me, once").

Note that rakastaa and auttaa always take the partitive — they describe ongoing, unbounded relationships to their object. The deeper logic lives on the partitive vs. accusative page; here, just anchor the contrast katsoi minua / näki minut.

The -t accusative is special — and rare

That final -t in minut, sinut, hänet, meidät, teidät, heidät is the only place in Finnish where a singular total object ends in -t. Ordinary nouns never do this — an ordinary total object uses the bare nominative or the genitive-shaped accusative (ostin auton, "I bought the car"). The -t form is reserved for personal pronouns and the question word kuka → kenet ("whom").

This form is also why the passive keeps the pronoun visible as an object: meidät kutsuttiin ("we were invited") uses the -t object even though there is no named subject.

Local cases: give it to me, call me, wait for me

The local cases are regular and cover motion, location, and "to/from a person." The two you will reach for constantly are the allative (minulle, "to me") and the adessive (minulla, "at me / I have").

Notice minulla on — Finnish has no verb "to have", so "I have" is literally "at-me is." That construction has its own page.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Memorise the strip minä → minun → minua → minut first; the rest follow.
• Genitive = possessor (minun), partitive = ongoing object (minua), accusative = completed object (minut).
• minä/sinä decline with back vowels (minua), but hän is front (häntä).
• The -t accusative (minut, hänet, kenet) exists only for pronouns and kuka — no ordinary noun takes a singular -t object.
• Local cases are regular: minulle (to me), minulla (at me/I have), minulta (from me).