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The Helsinki Area & Language Studies (HALS) initiative is an offshoot of the LDHFTA (= Linguistic Diversity: Historical, Functional and Typological Approaches) research community. LDHFTA was assessed as among the most successful research clusters at the Univ. of Helsinki (UH) in the past research evaluation. HALS intends to keep this positive momentum and will serve as an intellectual, and hopefully in the future also a very practical, support structure at the UH for language studies that take into account linguistic diversity, language contact and historical linguistics and which are thoroughly grounded in the cultural context of the speaker communities (linguistic ethnographies, language descriptions, as well as documentation projects).
The core group contains PIs from the following fields (in no particular order): General linguistics, Finno-Ugric studies, Slavonic studies, Asian studies, and African and Middle-Eastern studies. Currently active members of a steering group include Axel Fleisch, Ulla-Maija Forsberg, Riho Grünthal, Ekaterina Gruzdeva, Juha Janhunen, Jouko Lindstedt, Matti Miestamo, and Janne Saarikivi, as well as Stephan Schulz who coordinates a range of tasks in connection with HALS.
We are currently preparing four summer schools with field site visits to be carried out over the years 2013-2016. Funding received as a result of the successful evaluation of the LDHFTA research community (coordinated by J. Janhunen) is earmarked for this purpose. If you are interested in this particular activity, please, navigate to Linguistic field trips.