How many cases are traditionally listed for Finnish nouns?

Finnish nouns are traditionally listed as having fifteen cases.

These cases allow Finnish to express relationships that English often handles with prepositions or word order. The familiar grammatical cases include nominative, genitive, accusative and partitive. Finnish also has several location-related cases: inessive means being inside, elative means moving out of, illative means moving into, while adessive, ablative and allative describe positions or movement associated with an outer surface or location.

The remaining cases include the essive and translative, along with less frequent forms such as instructive, abessive and comitative. Case endings attach to noun stems, but Finnish spelling and pronunciation are also shaped by vowel harmony and consonant gradation.

The number can look inconsistent across textbooks because linguists do not always classify every form identically. In particular, some analyses treat the accusative differently, and dialects may add or vary forms. The traditional standard count, however, is fifteen, making it the expected answer to this wording. Finnish does not have “fifteen genders”; its case system concerns grammatical roles and relationships.