When organizing a charity drive, you often want to emphasize that every donation and every volunteer matters. To express "every" or "each" in Finnish, use the indefinite pronoun jokainen.
When describing a noun, jokainen agrees with it, meaning it must take the same case ending. Like most Finnish words ending in -nen, its stem changes to -se- before most case endings, while its partitive form is jokaista.
| Case | Suffix | Form of jokainen |
|---|
| Nominative | - | jokainen |
| Genitive | -n | jokaisen |
| Partitive | -a/ä | jokaista |
| Inessive | -ssa/ssä | jokaisessa |
| Illative | -en | jokaiseen |
| Elative | -sta/stä | jokaisesta |
| Adessive | -lla/llä | jokaisella |
| Ablative | -lta/ltä | jokaiselta |
| Allative | -lle | jokaiselle |
The Grammatical Core: Nominative, Genitive, and Partitive
Let's look at the basic cases first. Notice how both jokainen and the noun it modifies take the exact same case endings.
When a verb requires its object to be in the partitive case (such as the verb auttaa), jokainen becomes jokaista.
Inner Local Cases (In, Into, From)
When dealing with locations, abstract connections, or expressing gratitude for something, use the inner local cases. Remember to build these on the stem jokaise-.
Outer Local Cases and "Everyone"
When jokainen is used entirely on its own without a noun, it translates to "everyone" or "each one".
This is especially common with the adessive case (-lla/-llä) in the "have" construction to say "everyone has", or with the ablative case (-lta/-ltä) to say you are asking something "from everyone".
Of course, the outer local cases are also used normally alongside nouns—such as when giving aid to every recipient.