In Finland, the usual way of writing dates in normal text is with the months spelled out. The format varies according to the language used. In Finnish, a full stop is placed after the day to indicate an ordinal: “31. toukokuuta 2002”; furthermore, the month is in the partitive case, always marked by -ta. The month can also be written first, now in genitive case (the day and the abbreviated word päivä, day, are in essive case as above): “toukokuun 31. pnä 2002”. In Swedish, the full stop is not used and the month is in nominative (without inflection): “den 31 maj 2002”.