Appendix:Finnish polite forms

In polite speech, the second-person singular forms may be replaced by polite forms. While the use of these forms is in decline, they still remain fairly common when addressing unfamiliar older people.

Second-person polite forms are largely the same as the second-person plural forms, including the use of the pronoun te (which is capitalized to Te in more formal written contexts), of second-person plural verb forms and of the second-person plural possessive suffix (-nne).

One major difference is that in compound tenses, like the perfect and the pluperfect, the participle remains in the singular in the polite form:

te olette ollut (second-person polite) ― you have been

te olette olleet (second-person plural) ― you have been

Also, words such as any predicates are not automatically in the plural:

Oletteko te lääkäri? (second-person polite) ― Are you a doctor?

Oletteko te lääkäreitä? (second-person plural) ― Are you doctors?