We study the variation and change in modern-day urban Finnish spoken language, and more generally the mechanisms in language change. Our material is drawn from a longitudinal corpus of Finnish spoken in Helsinki and Tampere, and our research group has members from the fields of linguistics, population biology, and statistics.
We combine sociolinguistics with, on the one hand, methods from population biology and computational data analysis, and on the other hand, the analysis of changing structures in terms of cognitive linguistics. Our goal is to gain new knowledge on how and why language changes over time and to further the use of quantitative methods within sociolinguistics.
Background
The longitudinal corpus of urban spoken Finnish has been collected since the 1970s. It provides excellent possibilities for the study of language change and its mechanisms, and also the fundamental sociolinguistic questions regarding the relationship between variation and change. Methodologically, we combine different disciplines which makes it possible to model linguistic change accurately and to assess the models critically.
In the corpus, it is possible to find speaker populations that differ from each other by linguistic features. A speaker can move from one population to another for example, speak more or less formally at different phases of ones life but these transitions are not always systematic in the way traditional sociolinguistic models assume. It is also possible to see changes that are more general than a single feature, so that a contracted form of an infinitive is not seen as a simple contraction but rather one part in the change of the overall infinitive system.
Funding source
Kone Foundation
Contact persons
Unni Leino
University Lecturer / Director of the Project
unni.leino [at] tuni.fi
+358 50 318 1234