People

Docent/Adjunct professor Lotta Aunio (formerly Harjula) is a university lecturer of Bantu languages at UH. Aunio’s research has focused on the description of Bantu languages, particularly their phonology and tonology. More information about Aunio’s activities and publications can be found in the UH research database .

 

Thera Crane is a postdoctoral researcher in the Academy of Finland project "Stability and Change in Language Contact: The Case of Southern Ndebele (South Africa)." Crane’s research interests include the semantics and pragmatics of tense, aspect, and mood expressions in Bantu languages, from both language-internal and typological perspectives. She is also interested in African language ecologies and their implications for language policy, especially in education. She has conducted extensive field research on endangered and minority Bantu languages in South Africa, Zambia, and Namibia. More information about Crane’s activities and publications can be found in the UH research database .

Ekaterina Gruzdeva is a docent and university lecturer of General Linguistics. More information about Gruzdeva’s activities and publications can be found in the UH research database .

Sami Honkasalo is an Assistant Professor of the Japanese and Chinese languages at UH. With a background in the functional-typological approach to language and an emphasis on source materials collected through linguistic fieldwork, his research primarily focuses on endangered minority languages of Eastern and Central Asia, such as Gyalrongic and Dungan.

More information about Juha Janhunen’s activities and publications can be found in the UH research database .

Friederike Lüpke is Professor of African Studies. Her regional research focus is on Mande and Atlantic languages of West Africa in their multilingual ecologies. Her main current research interests concern small-scale multilingualism, inclusive multilingual learning, multilingual writing and literacy and the ethnography of synthetic multilingualism emerging in and around the use of AI. These topics are bound together by the overarching question of how language as a social category is constructed in different contexts, and how these notional categories relate to situated language use.

Riikka Länsisalmi is university lecturer in Japanese and docent of Japanese studies at UH. Länsisalmi’s research interests include the Japanese language, language (education) policies, endangered languages and language revitalization, language attitudes and ideologies, law and language, linguistic anthropology, interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and language pedagogy. More information about Länsisalmi’s publications and activities can be found in the UH research database .

Matti Miestamo is professor in General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. His primary research fields are language typology taking a broad cross-linguistic comparative perspective and language documentation and description. His research interests include negation, interrogatives and language complexity, as well as typological theory and methodology. The focus of his documentary and descriptive work has been on the Skolt Saami language spoken in northern Finland. More information on Miestamo’s publications and activities can be found in the UH research database and on his .

Stephan Schulz is one of the coordinators of HALS and a doctoral student in African studies working on analyzing the phonology of the Southern Ndebele (isiNdebele) language spoken in northeastern South Africa. Besides phonology, tonology and phonetics, Schulz’s interests include e.g. possessive constructions and conceptual metaphor, and more generally, learning culturally, cognitively and historically informed holistic approaches to language research, as well as getting familiar with statistical and computational methods in linguistics. More information about Schulz’s activities and publications can be found in the UH research database .

Ksenia Shagal is a postdoctoral researcher at UH. Shagal is currently involved in a typological project on (non-)finiteness in dependent clauses led by Johanna Nichols. After that, she is going to start her own postdoctoral project focusing on non-finite forms in Uralic languages from a typological, areal and contact perspective. Shagal’s background is in linguistic typology (the title of her doctoral dissertation was , defended in April 2017). She has also done field work on a number of underdescribed languages including Kalmyk, Nanai, Erzya, Nivkh, Uilta, and Hill Mari. More information about Shagals’s activities and publications can be found in the UH research database and at .

Kaius Sinnemäki is Professor of quantitative and comparative linguistics at the University of Helsinki. His current research interests include a typological approach to language contact and multilingualism as well as the cross-language distribution of grammatical complexity. He is currently directing the interdisciplinary research programme . He has previously worked, among others, as a core fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and as an acting lecturer in general linguistics at the University of Tampere. More information about Sinnemäki's activities and publications can be found in the UH research database .

Eeva Sippola is a professor at the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. Sippola’s research interests include contact linguistics, especially creoles, postcolonial linguistics, and Ibero-American languages and cultures. More information about Sippola’s activities and publications can be found in the UH research database and at her .

Max Wahlström is a linguist with a background in South-Slavic philology. His research deals with a range of topics within morphosyntax and information structure in South-Slavic languages, the languages of the Balkans, and across the languages of the world. His main topic is the interplay of argument marking and information structure from dialectological, historical, contact linguistic, and typological perspectives. The crosslinguistic component of the research seeks to understand the variation and areal spread of these phenomena. He has conducted field work in Eastern Serbia with the speakers of South-Slavic Torlak dialects. Wahlström is also interested in the theoretical underpinnings of the study of linguistic areas and contact-induced language change. In addition, his academic interests include the development of literary languages and historical and contemporary socio-linguistics of the Balkan languages. More information about Wahlström’s activities and publications can be found in the UH research database .