Word order is often said to be “free” in Finnish. The truth is that one can often change word order without changing the basic meaning of the sentence, but the emphasis or side meaning or style typically changes. This applies primarily to the order of the basic constituents of a sentence: subject, predicate, and object.
Let us consider an example: the English sentence “Pete loves Anna” and its Finnish equivalent Pete rakastaa Annaa, where the case suffix a in Annaa indicates the grammatical object, no matter what the word order is. We could put the words of this sentence into any order, still speaking about Pete loving Anna, but with different purposes and different tones:
Adverbials, expressing mode, time, and other circumstances, can be placed in different places in a sentence, as in English. In Finnish, we can say Eilen kävin hänen luonaan or Kävin hänen luonaan eilen, just as we can say “Yesterday I visited him” or “I visited him yesterday”. In Finnish we can even place the time adverbial eilen (yesterday) right after the predicate: Kävin eilen hänen luonaan, whereas “I visited yesterday him” would not be acceptable in English. So in this context, Finnish has more free word order. This does not mean that the order is irrelevant; it can express emphasis or tone, or it may be stylistic.
The attributes of a word usually precede it, in Finnish as well as in English. We say sinun punainen tukkasi, using the same order as in English “your red hair”. In Finnish, other orders are possible, but poetic. It would be even more poetic, or just strange, to split phrases e.g. by writing Sinun muistan tukkasi nyt punaisen instead of the normal Muistan nyt sinun punaisen tukkasi (I remember now your red hair).
In a sequence of attributes, the longest is usually placed last, especially in established phrases. This explains why the French motto “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” is expressed in Finnish with the last two words in the opposite order: Vapaus, veljeys, tasa-arvoisuus.