School of Humanities

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. 

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