Agreeing pronouns and quantifiers
When you combine a personal pronoun (like me, te, or he) with a quantifier like kaikki (all) or molemmat (both), Finnish requires them to match perfectly. Instead of using a preposition like in English ("all of us"), you decline both words into the exact same case.
| Case | Pronoun | Quantifier | Together | English |
|---|
| Genitive | meidän | kaikkien | meidän kaikkien | all of our / of us all |
| Allative | teille | molemmille | teille molemmille | to both of you |
Whenever a grammar rule demands a specific case—such as a genitive subject for täytyy (must)—the entire phrase takes that ending.
Agreement with verb rections
As you organize your neighborhood watch, you will encounter verbs that demand specific cases for their targets. The simultaneous inflection rule applies here too.
For example, katsoa (to look at) takes the partitive, so "all of us" becomes meitä kaikkia. Pitää (to like) takes the elative, so "both of them" becomes heistä molemmista.
Expressing possession and origins
This same double inflection applies to the local cases, such as the adessive (-lla/-llä) and the ablative (-lta/-ltä).
Because the Finnish "to have" construction places the owner in the adessive case, expressing "we all have" requires putting both the pronoun and the quantifier into the adessive: meillä kaikilla on. Similarly, if a verb demands the ablative case (meaning "from"), both words take the ending.