Inessive case is a locative

Locative case

Locative is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by"...

 grammatical case

Grammatical case

In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...

. This case carries the basic meaning of "in": for example, "in the house" is "talo·ssa" in Finnish

Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

, "maja·s" in Estonian

Estonian language

Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...

, "etxea·n" in Basque

Basque language

Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...

, "nam·e" in Lithuanian

Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...

 and "ház·ban" in Hungarian

Hungarian language

Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

.

In Finnish the inessive case is typically formed by adding "ssa/ssä". Estonian adds "s" to the genitive stem. In Hungarian, the suffix

Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...

 "ban/ben" is most commonly used for inessive case, although many others, such as -on, -en, -ön and others are also used, especially with cities.

In the Finnish language, the inessive case is considered the first (in Estonian language

Estonian language

Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...

 the second) of the six locative cases, which correspond to locational  prepositions in English. The remaining five cases are:

• Elative case
  Elative case
  See Elative for disambiguation.Elative is a locative case with the basic meaning "out of"....
  
   ("out of")
• Illative case
  Illative case
  Illative is, in the Finnish language, Estonian language and the Hungarian language, the third of the locative cases with the basic meaning of "into ". An example from Hungarian is "a házba"...
  
   ("into")
• Adessive case
  Adessive case
  In Uralic languages, such as Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, the adessive case is the fourth of the locative cases with the basic meaning of "on". For example, Estonian laud and laual , Hungarian asztal and asztalnál...
  
   ("on")
• Ablative case
  Ablative case
  In linguistics, ablative case is a name given to cases in various languages whose common characteristic is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ...
  
   ("off")
• Allative case
  Allative case
  Allative case is a type of the locative cases used in several languages. The term allative is generally used for the lative case in the majority of languages which do not make finer distinctions.-Finnish language:In the Finnish language, the allative is the fifth of the locative cases, with the...
  
  ("onto")