Teaching at the University of Helsinki is based on research and provided by researchers well-versed in their discipline, teaching the topics of their research.
In addition to relevant research-based knowledge, university education utilises diverse teaching and assessment methods promoting students’ learning, the development of scholarly thinking and the establishment of expertise.
From the beginning of their studies, students are part of the academic community. They get to familiarise themselves with the latest research. In many fields, students have the opportunity to complete their thesis in collaboration with research groups.
Internationally, English scholars at the University of Helsinki are particularly well known for the study of the history, variation and change of the English language. Researchers have developed a wealth of digital text collections (corpora) for research purposes. You can learn more about this research on the website of the VARIENG research unit.
Other topics studied include English as a global language and lingua franca, language policy in academic settings, digital or computer-mediated discourse and multimodality. Methods are drawn from pragmatics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, among others.
Literary studies in the discipline are also active – the staff members study all kinds of literature in English from the 1500s to the present. Key subjects include Anglo-American fiction, postcolonial and migrant literature, Renaissance drama and poetry, science fiction and fantasy. Primary material features novels, short stories, poems and plays, and the methods employed include narratological, postcolonial and cognitive approaches, in use for example in the Instrumental Narratives project.
Research Unit for the Study of Variation, Contacts and Change in English
VARIENG stands for the Research Unit for the Study of Variation, Contacts and Change in English. It also stands for innovative thinking and team work in English corpus linguistics and the study of language variation and change. VARIENG members study the English language, its uses and users, both today and in the past. They are interested in how language is situated in social, cognitive, textual and discourse contexts, and produced in speaker interaction; how language varies and changes in meaning and structure; and how change is connected with language typology.
Languaging Crises: Diachronic Perspectives on Public Communication during Three Pandemics
Funded by the Academy of Finland, the research project ‘Languaging Crises: Diachronic Perspectives on Public Communication during Three Pandemics’ focuses on public communication in the United Kingdom and the United States during the tuberculosis (1882–1900), Spanish flu (1918-19) and COVID-19 (2020-23) pandemics. It specifically studies how authorities communicate information about the pandemics to citizens through data such as newspaper articles, press releases, government statements, and in the case of COVID-19, social media data.
Research in the project asks questions such as:
• How has authorities’ communication changed over time and during different pandemics?
• How are different parts of society and different groups of people represented in the authorities’ communication?
• How do authorities refer to expert knowledge in their communication?
The research aims to give us a better understanding of the linguistic and communicative choices involved in public crisis communication. This is helpful, for example, when planning how to communicate information efficiently in different contexts and to different groups of people.
Language Attitudes and Ideologies in Finland
The LAIF research project, funded by the Kone Foundation, uses sociolinguistic methodology to examine prevailing language ideologies and attitudes in Finland. The project aims to raise language awareness in Finland and bring scientific research closer to citizens. The researchers aim to provide information on what it means to live in multilingual contemporary Finland from the perspective of different language groups and thus to increase mutual understanding among people living in Finland. Contributing to what has been described as the Fourth Wave of Sociolinguistics they combine high-quality research with linguistic activism, aiming to redress social injustices and inequalities.
Democratization, Mediatization and Language Practices in Britain, 1700–1950
DEMLANG produces knowledge about the interrelatedness of the sociocultural processes of democratization and mediatization, and language practices in Britain, 1700–1950. The aim is to discover mechanisms operating in the bidirectional relationship between sociocultural change and language change. This relationship will be empirically studied in public and private texts mediating ideologies and values. Macrolevel analyses with large corpora allow data-driven tracing of changing patterns in lexis, phraseology and syntax and the discovery of statistically significant turning points, while microlevel analyses with philologically well-argued smaller corpora make it possible to uncover the complexity of phenomena and to explain emerging, changing and declining linguistic features with the help of historical background data.
DEMLANG is a four-year consortium project between the Universities of Helsinki and Tampere. The Helsinki team includes the project leader Minna Palander-Collin and senior researchers Turo Hiltunen and Minna Nevala.
Language Regulation in Academia
The LaRA project explores different forms and practices of language regulation in academic settings. Language regulation is understood in broad terms, as all the various ways in which language users intervene in and monitor their own and others’ language. Forms of regulation range from speakers correcting each others’ language in interaction to institutionally imposed language policies and guidelines about acceptable usage. The project is funded by the Kone Foundation.
As research adapts to changes in society to focus on new, salient issues, work in certain projects is finished to make way for new ones. Here are a few examples of research projects on English at the University of Helsinki that have recently concluded.
Interfacing Structured and Unstructured Data in Sociolinguistic Research on Language Change
The STRATAS project studied language change by developing tools that enable us to ask questions that have until now been too labour-intensive to answer. These tools were being developed by computer scientists and visualization specialists in collaboration with language historians who study the development of English and Finnish over time.
You can find further information about the STRATAS project here.
One of the major challenges in linguistic research is unravelling the process of language change. Sociolinguists have made great strides by analysing change in apparent time, comparing the language use of successive generations at a given point in time. Information on real-time change is harder to come by but, thanks to the digital turn in the humanities, more data is available that enables the diachronic approach. However, empirical work on change over time is still fragmented and provides only a patchy coverage of certain aspects of change.
The project aimed at describing stylistic changes in medical English in a long diachronic perspective in a multifaceted sociohistorical framework: in addition to anchoring texts in their generic and sociolinguistic context, we studied linguistic phenomena in relation to scientific ideologies. For our research material, we compiled a computer-readable Corpus of Early English Medical Writing. The results obtained from several studies show that this new approach is fruitful and that variability in language reflects a complex network of underlying parameters. For a comprehensive diachronic description further studies are needed, but some lines of development are gradually beginning to emerge, and we have reached a stage where some level of synthesis is possible. Individual members of the project have adapted the methodological frame to their own research purposes.