In the Language Bank: Atte Huhtala

Who are you?

I am Atte Huhtala. I have a Master’s degree in Finnish Language and currently, I work as a jointly supervised doctoral researcher in Finno-Ugric linguistics at the Universities of Turku and Tartu. I also participate in the activities of two research groups: the project , led by Tuomas Huumo and funded by the Research Council of Finland; and , led by Karl Pajusalu and funded by the Estonian Research Council (ETAG).

What is your research topic?

My main area of research is meaning-driven study of grammar. My doctoral thesis examines the grammatical means of expressing approximative motion in Finnic and Permic languages. In my research, I examine, among other things, the grammatical words luo and tykö, which function as adverbs and postpositions in Finnish and express movement towards someone or something, as well as the grammatical words kohti and päin, which I refer to as target grams. In addition to Finnish, I examine and compare the use of linguistic elements with similar meanings in Estonian and in the Permic languages Komi and Udmurt. Other areas of linguistics that interest me include areal variation in Finnish and Estonian, the comparative typology of Finnic languages, multidisciplinary research on the human past, and the history of Uralic languages.

How is your research related to Kielipankki – the Language Bank of Finland?

I became familiar with the Language Bank and its resources during my basic studies of Finnish, when I participated in an , which was organized by FIN-CLARIN. In my Bachelor’s and Master’s theses, I utilised several corpora that are available via the Language Bank: the , the  representing the online discussion genre, and the . During my studies, I also worked on the project Linguistic Variation in the Province of Satakunta in the 21st Century, whose result, the , was recently published in the Language Bank.

The Finnish-language material for my doctoral research, like that of my previous theses, comes from the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland for written contemporary language, while the dialect material is drawn from the Dialect Corpus of the Syntax Archive, the , and the  collection.

The diverse resources of the Language Bank have also provided ideas for numerous smaller studies and reviews. One example of this is the presentation I gave at the  (Finnish Conference of Linguistics) in spring 2025, where I examined the use of the word tykö in Old Literary Finnish based on the .

Corpora

The  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.  is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.