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.

At the heart of language research, we find language contacts, multilingualism, the regional and social variation of language, and language and its typical and aberrant development. In the subject of Finnish, the research has focused on the variation and change of Finnish regional dialects, syntactic phenomena of spoken language and the Baltic Finnish languages, especially the Karelian-Finnish language contacts and the social situation of the Karelian language. In the field of English, we are internationally renowned in the study of world English, with a focus on the use of English in a multilingual environment as well as the structural variation of modern English. We also cross disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with computer science in the study of computational sociolinguistics, which uses large data sets and utilizes computational expertise in their analysis. Research in this area focuses on the diffusion of innovation in digital social networks. The department also examines Russia in the light of historical and current language contacts, as well as Russia in the media. In the field of general linguistics and language technology, acoustic research of both typical and atypical (pathological) speech and the application of statistical and machine learning methods to speech research are carried out, also partly in collaboration with computer science. In the field of logopedics, research focuses on the developmental challenges of language in large original and registered materials in national and international collaboration, including cooperation with UEF's School of Computing. Research is also being conducted on multilingualism, children’s speech challenges, adult aphasia, and swallowing.

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.