Human mobility is constantly on the rise. The world is getting smaller ‒ and bigger ‒ through the increased number of linguistic and cultural encounters. There is an ongoing need for more versatile and reform-oriented expertise in these encounters.
Here, at the School of Humanities, we offer an excellent opportunity to study languages and culture from a Bachelor’s degree to doctoral studies. Our research and education are diverse and international, and we encourage a multidisciplinary approach to studying how languages and cultures meet, generate meaning and affect our lives.
83
Staff members
1,333
Degree students (2019)
40
International Master's degrees awarded (2019)
Studies
The School of Humanities offers high-quality education in Foreign Languages and Translation Studies, and Finnish Language and Cultural Research. We educate language teachers, translators and various other experts in languages and cultures to work, for example, in research, media, non-profit organisations and businesses in both public and private sectors.
You can take advantage of the wide variety of academic subjects that we offer and, with the help of our student-centred guidance, compile a degree that suits your personality and gives you a competitive edge in the job market. You can complement your degree with courses and modules on offer at our own school or at any other school of the University of Eastern Finland. Our international exchange networks and three international Master’s degree programmes guarantee that you have plenty of opportunities for internationalisation.

This department has been granted free access to the Memsource Academic Edition, an
academic program designed for universities with translation courses.

MemoQ Academic Program provides universities free access to the memoQ Translation Pro environment and allows students to buy the software cost-effectively.
International Master's degree programmes and Doctoral programme
Research
Here, at the School of Humanities, we conduct state-of-the-art research in the profile area of cultural encounters, mobilities and borders. As an emerging field, we are developing digital humanities, but our main research priorities concentrate on contacts between languages and cultures, which is an extremely topical research area because of the constantly increasing cross-border mobility and interaction.
In digital humanities, we focus on the cultural study of technology and on language and translation technology. This is our response to the ever-increasing pace of technological development and the way it changes people’s lives. We are interested in the multidisciplinary opportunities that advancing technology has to offer for research.
The driving forces of our research are multidisciplinarity and the high social impact of its results.
Research areas
The School of Humanities focuses on cultures as objects of research in several disciplines including literatures in Finnish and other Modern Languages as well as in cultural studies. In our research, culture is understood in a wide sense as art and folk culture, popular and media culture, and above all, as a form of people’s everyday life. What is central to all of them are various encounters. For the researchers at the School, culture takes the form of different texts and performances in diverse media, sensual, disciplinary, and socio-cultural systems. In terms of method, cultures, their members and products are examined using different textual, ethnographic, and other field methods. The study of cultures is interdisciplinary and is based on international contacts and transnational networks. Many research projects in the field are linked with the BOMOCULT Research Community and contribute to the Cultural Encounters, Mobility, and Borders Profile Area at UEF.
Research in languages and linguistics focuses on language contacts, multilingualism as well as on areal and social variation. In the Finnish language, we study variation in regional dialects, syntax in spoken Finnish, and the Baltic Finnic languages. A special attention is on language contact phenomena between Karelian and Finnish and on the role and status of the Karelian in society. The English subject is known for its World English research of English use in multilingual settings and of grammatical variation in present-day Englishes. We also cross disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with computer science in computational sociolinguistics. Using large and complex datasets and quantitative methods, we investigate the role of digital social networks in innovation diffusion. In the Russian subject, we specialize in language contacts in Russian, both in historical and in contemporary settings. We also study Russian in mass media. The research in linguistics and language technology focuses on speech acoustics of both typical and atypical populations and uses advanced statistical methods and machine learning in speech research, partly also in cooperation with computer science.
Research in translation studies at the School of Humanities is versatile and belongs to one of the university’s main strategic profile areas: cultural encounters, mobilities and borders. Translation-related questions are often investigated from a cognitive or sociological perspective, and the key areas include the various phenomena involved in translation process, translator’s competence and expertise, translation and ideology, translator training, and the status and working conditions of professional translators. Translation studies can also be combined with cognitive linguistics and contact linguistics, for example, when analyzing the transfer of linguistic messages in different translational contexts or scrutinizing such forms of non-professional translation as military or journalistic translation or the translation of endangered languages. Other important areas include corpus research and the study of translation technology especially with respect to translator training, translators’ work as well as the reception of translations.
News and events
Contact information


















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Postal address
University of Eastern Finland
Philosophical Faculty
School of Humanities
P.O. Box 111, FI-80101
Finland
Visiting address
Yliopistokatu 4, Agora