Finnish

(index ku)

Pronoun

kukaan

1. (indefinite, in question clauses) anybody, anyone.

   • Tietääkö kukaan, missä se on?
     • Does anybody know where it is?

2. (indefinite, with a negation verb form) no-one, none, nobody, not ... anybody/anyone.

   • Kukaan ei halua sellaista tulevaisuutta lapsilleen.
     • None wants that kind of future for their children.
   • Älkää puhuko tästä kenellekään!
     • Don't talk to anyone about this!

Inflection

• All the cases of kukaan, except for the nominative singular, are old-fashioned. They can sometimes be used e.g. to arouse listeners' or readers' attention. In modern Finnish those cases have been replaced by the corresponding cases of kenkään — the nominative kenkään is, however, used only in poetic language, and even there very infrequently.
• Several of the singular cases of "ken" can be shortened by dropping -en from the stem, e.g. kenellekään > kellekään.
• Note like all Finnish personal pronouns, "kenkään" has the accusative form, kenetkään.
• There are also the abessive cases, but they are very infrequently used.
• There are also the instructive, temporal and causative cases, but they have by their meanings completely diverged from kukaan.

Related terms

Pronouns with same stems:

• joka
• jokin
• joku
• jompikumpi
• kuka
• kukin
• kumpi
• kumpikaan
• kumpikin

Anagrams

• akkuna, kaakun, nukkaa