Verbs: Passive / Impersonal Form — Finnish Grammar

Finnish has a single verb form for stating that an action happens without naming who does it. English handles the same idea in two ways - with the passive ("Finnish is spoken here") or with a vague subject ("people / they / one drink a lot of coffee here"). The Finnish form is usually called the "passive", but it is closer to an impersonal: it deliberately leaves the doer unstated, and there is no "by …" phrase as in the English passive.

Its present marker is -taan if the verb contains a, o or u, and -tään if it does not.

"People do…" / "It is done…"

Suomessa juodaan paljon kahvia.
In Finland people drink a lot of coffee.
Täällä puhutaan suomea.
Finnish is spoken here.
Kaupassa myydään leipää.
Bread is sold in the shop.
Miten tämä sana lausutaan?
How is this word pronounced?

The Everyday "We"

In ordinary speech this same form replaces the first-person plural and is the normal way to say "let's…". This colloquial use is extremely common - far more so than the textbook form - and worth recognising and using early.

Mennään kotiin.
Let's go home. / We're going home.
Mitä tehdään tänään?
What shall we do today?
Nähdään huomenna!
See you tomorrow! (literally "we'll be seen")

The Past Impersonal

The past marker is -ttiin.

Eilen syötiin kalaa.
Yesterday fish was eaten / we ate fish.
Talo rakennettiin sata vuotta sitten.
The house was built a hundred years ago.

The Negative

Täällä ei puhuta englantia.
English is not spoken here.
Eilen ei tehty mitään.
Nothing was done yesterday.

How It Differs from the English Passive

Because the Finnish form never names the doer, an English passive that does ("the letter was written by Anna") is normally turned back into an ordinary active sentence in Finnish: ("Anna wrote the letter").

In the course

Sentences from Lingora’s Finnish course

15 of the course's 500 sentences use this, the first in lesson 49. A few of them, with the words “Verbs: Passive / Impersonal Form” is about in bold:

Kyllä. Syödään kiinalaista ruokaa.
Yes. Let's eat Chinese food.
Lesson 127

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