HALS, Helsinki Diversity Linguistics Group, is a multidisciplinary research community that brings together people working on linguistic diversity from different perspectives: areal, typological, historical, and societal. HALS research takes both local and global perspectives. Linguistic fieldwork, conducted in collaboration with speakers and communities across the world, forms the core of HALS research activities. This fieldwork complements and informs our large-scale typological comparative work on linguistic diversity. HALS organizes collective field trips that give students real-life fieldwork experience. The viability and well-being of linguistic communities is a central concern for HALS, and many of its members work to support communities in revitalizing and maintaining their languages and cultures. HALS also organizes seminars and workshops that support research on linguistic diversity.
In human sciences, research data often represents global diversity poorly. In few fields of research is Western or Euro-centric bias more harmful than in linguistics – how linguists understand language often determines how other fields, such as neuroscience, operationalize language-related topics. Our knowledge of what language is hinges on our understanding of what actual languages can do. Deep knowledge of only the most widely spoken and best documented languages leads to conclusions based on an arbitrary sample of a fraction of the total data. Typologists within HALS contribute to the abstract understanding of language. In linguistic typology, linguists address the unity and diversity of languages, seeking to map the full variety of ways a linguistic feature can be represented. With quantitative typological methods, linguists can address the distribution of variation and test the validity of universal claims.
HALS develops fieldwork methods and ethical solutions in collaboration with communities of speakers, which both lead to higher quality fieldwork results and supports the communities in their aims to revitalize their languages. Linguistic research aids language revitalization by generating knowledge about the target languages. This knowledge can be used to produce teaching materials and support language planning, expanding the use of the languages into new domains. Additionally, it improves understanding at the administrative level and highlights the importance of linguistic diversity for societies.
More than 7,000 languages have been identified by linguists. This diversity is easy to forget, since most people speak a language backed by institutions like schools and mass media. Did you know that Finnish, despite being sometimes called a small language, is among the top 2% of the world’s languages in terms of institutional recognition, and among top 30 languages in terms of content on the internet? Like the loss of ecological diversity, loss of linguistic diversity has complex negative consequences, often leading to the loss of intangible cultural heritage as well. Linguistic structures and lexicon can be used to study ancient communities and their interactions in combination with, for instance, archeological and genetic data. An extinct, undocumented language is therefore a missed opportunity for the study of the humanity’s past. Documenting, describing, and helping to maintain linguistic diversity is a global challenge spearheaded by linguists – including many within HALS.
The acronym of the Helsinki Diversity Linguistics Group, HALS, derives from the former name of the group, the Helsinki Area Language Studies. The name was changed in the spring of 2021 to better reflect the research interests of the members.
HALS is an offshoot of the LDHFTA (= Linguistic Diversity: Historical, Functional and Typological Approaches) research community. LDHFTA was recognized as one of the most successful research clusters at the University of Helsinki (UH) in a past research evaluation (coordinated by J. Janhunen). The funding received from the evaluation enabled the organization of four
For more information, you may contact HALS coordinator Noora Ahola (noora.ahola(at)helsinki.fi).
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