Who are you?
I am Pekka Posio, Professor of Ibero-Romance Languages at the Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki. I focus on Spanish and Portuguese, and examine sociolinguistics, pragmatics and language change and variation. Currently, I am the head of discipline for Portuguese, Galician and Basque languages.
I studied Romance Languages and General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki, where I obtained my PhD in 2012. The topic of my dissertation was the expression of subject pronouns in Spanish and Portuguese. During my post doc phase, I worked in Salamanca, Berlin, Cologne and Ghent, studying impersonal constructions in Spanish and Portuguese. I also worked for three years as a university lecturer in Spanish at Stockholm University before returning to Helsinki in 2019 as an associate professor. In 2024, I was appointed as a professor.
What is your research topic?
Currently, my research focuses on language and gender in the Spanish-speaking world and I lead the research project Gender, Society, and Language Use: Evidence from Mexico and Spain (2021–2025), funded by the Kone Foundation. Language and gender is a well-established area of research in the study of the English language and English linguistics, but has received less attention in Spanish studies.
In this project, we are particularly interested in the mechanisms that link society and gender to language use, and whether there are differences in the relationship between gender and language in different societies that use the same language. These questions will be approached through both sociolinguistics and social psychology. We have collected a wide range of data, including both spoken and transcribed language and socio-psychological data on our informants. By combining these data, we will be able to explore the links between language and gender in a completely new way and at the same time renew the concept of gender as a sociolinguistic variable. In addition to the traditional comparison of female and male speech, we use scalar variables such as speakers’ perceptions of their own masculinity and femininity, and gender-related attitudes and perceptions.
We study different phenomena of language use – for example, the prevalence of different grammatical persons and ways of interacting in speech – in two societies that share the same language but differ in terms of gender roles and norms. We collected data between 2022 and 2023 in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Valencia, Spain. The research data generated by this project will help to broaden and diversify our understanding of gender and its manifestations, particularly in the societies we studied.
The post doc researchers in this project are Gloria Uclés Ramada, Sven Kachel, Andrea Carcelén Guerrero and Fien de Latte. The project has also employed a number of students as data collectors, transcribers and coders in Finland, Spain, Mexico and Germany.
How is your research related to Kielipankki – the Language Bank of Finland?
We have produced a corpus called Corpus for the Study of Language and Gender in Mexico and Spain (CoLaGe), which contains 111 hours and over one million words of recorded and transcribed speech from 127 informants. The corpus is divided into a sub-corpus for Valencia (CoLaGe-V) and Guadalajara (CoLaGe-G), and a smaller CoLaGe-D(iversity) corpus collected in Guadalajara, with informants representing gender and/or sexual minorities. In collecting the data, we have tried to obtain data that are as comparable as possible, with speakers from two age groups (30–40 and 60–70) and two countries. The data include sociolinguistic interviews, role-plays simulating conflict situations and material elicited for phonetic research in which informants describe images they have seen.
In addition to comparability, the collection of data was guided by the need to make all the extensive material available to other researchers, which is why a great deal of attention has been paid to issues such as pseudonymisation. The majority of the speech material has also been recorded on studio equipment, which allows it to be used for phonetic analysis. The Language Bank of Finland has been a natural location for the CoLaGe corpus since its inception. The social psychology data from the project will also be made available to researchers via the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.
Selected publications from the project
Carcelen Guerrero, A., Posio, P., Kachel, S. & Uclés Ramada, G. (Accepted 2025). CoLaGe: Corpus for the study of language and gender in two varieties of Spanish. Corpora.
Uclés Ramada, G., Kachel, S. & Posio, P., 2025. Conflict, gender, and amount of talk: Gender differences in Spanish role play data. Pragmatics and Society.
Posio, P., Kachel, S., & Uclés Ramada, G. 2024. Morphosyntactic stereotypes of speakers with different genders and sexual orientations: an experimental investigation. Linguistics.
Corpus
The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers of Social Sciences and Humanities to use, refine, preserve and share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.