Scandinavian language research at the University of Helsinki has a long history of dealing with multilingualism and variety within the Swedish and the Scandinavian linguistic area. We are interested in research questions that are relevant for our society, and therefore we focus on topics such as the Swedish language in Finland, minority languages, language contact, language politics, and language varieties within both spoken and written language, as well as the teaching of Swedish both as a first language and as a second or foreign language.
Examples of our research topics:
Our researchers are involved in numerous projects with a strong societal relevance and many of them have positions of trust in the society. Among those are memberships in various language boards, involvement in the matriculation examination (Sw. Studentexamen, Fi. Ylioppilastutkinto), other language exams, collaboration with associations and organisations, as well as expert assignments where we use our research-based knowledge for the benefit of the society. Some of those projects are mentioned on the researchers’ pages, while others can be found by closely reading their CVs and activities.
Discipline coordinator of Scandinavian languages is Jannika Lassus. If you are, or your organisation is, interested in collaboration, you can contact the discipline coordinator or any of our researchers. Schools or others who would like to visit us can contact Therese Lindström Tiedemann.
Feel free to watch our films in Swedish, which give some information about us and our study programmes: