| Summary: | Both Estonian and Finnish have six local cases, which divide into interior and exterior cases. From the historical point of view the interior cases are older than the exterior ones. The interior cases date back to the Proto-Uralic, whereas the exterior cases in Estonian and Finnish have a Baltic-Finnic background and are thus notably younger. From the semantic point of view there are no peculiarities in the basic function of the interior and exterior cases. Interior cases are used with three-dimensional entities and exterior cases with two-dimensional ones. However, the interior and exterior cases also diff er in the level of abstraction. Exterior cases are younger and hence at the time they developed there was no urgent need to express local meanings, which left them “free” to take on various kinds of abstract meanings as, for example, time, possession, animate vs. inanimate etc. Although Estonian and Finnish local cases have the same historical background and similar basic local meanings, there are also a lot of differences between the Estonian and Finnish local cases. Some of them involve an opposite use of the interior and exterior cases in the two languages, while some of them reveal completely diff erent meanings current in those languages. The aim of the article is to pinpoint the usage diff erences between the Estonian and Finnish local cases and to study some of them more closely.
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