Postdoctoral researcher Laura Hekanaho believes studying language attitudes can help increase language awareness and combat linguistic injustice.
Life before LAIF: From pronoun battles to attitudes towards English
I am a postdoctoral researcher specializing in sociolinguistics (among other things), and believe it or not, there was life before LAIF! (The puns are endless, I’m afraid). But how did I get here?
I’ve always loved learning new things, but when I first started my undergraduate studies at the University of Helsinki, I didn’t really know what kind of career I wanted to pursue. Once I realized you could actually learn new things for a living (that is, do research), I was sold. Of course, it took a few more years before I was able to convince someone to actually pay me to learn new things.
I suppose my research journey started already with my MA thesis in 2015, in which I investigated masculine generics with an online survey — inspired by the Language and gender course that I had taken, taught by Liz Peterson (yes, the PI of LAIF!). One thing that really surprised me with the survey results was how the participants reacted to the very last, additional question I had included in the survey. The question was: “Could a new, gender neutral 3rd person pronoun (he, she, it) be added to English?” Many were upset by the idea.
And so I ended up studying pronouns at a time which turned out to be very favorable: I started my PhD in 2016 and the public discussion on “gender-neutral pronouns” (and toilets, in fact) really blew up in 2017. For my PhD, I also chose to do a survey since I had found it to be a useful tool to collect data both on usage and attitudes — I also made sure to get proper methodological training. In the end I was really happy with the survey data, there were nearly 1200 participants, and the data was rich both quantitatively and qualitatively. I defended my PhD in late 2020, and in my dissertation I was able to both examine the results as a whole and really tease out some interesting details from the data. Turns out, people feel really strongly about pronouns — and I proposed that broader ideologies about gender and equality were behind overt arguments either supporting or opposing nonbinary pronouns specifically. If you don’t want to read my whole dissertation, I also kept a PhD research blog.
The postdoc LAIF
While the English pronoun discussion was heated in 2017, at the same time, gender-exclusive language became a hot topic in Finland. This was when a big newspaper from Tampere, Aamulehti, announced they would switch to using gender-inclusive job titles, instead of the conventional masculine job titles. This announcement really sparked a lot of controversy, and what was fascinating to me was how similar the arguments were to what I was finding in my own PhD data but also in previous studies on English. I was really itching to look into the Finnish discourse from a research-perspective, but I waited until I was finished with my PhD. As my first postdoctoral research project at the University of Jyväskylä, then, I conducted a survey on gender-exclusive and gender-inclusive job titles in Finnish. You can read more about that research on my other research blog, only in Finnish though.
I also wanted to expand my skillset during my postdoc, and so I pursued a few corpus projects as well. Together with Ylva Biri and Professor Minna Palander-Collin we investigated online verbal aggression in the NETLANG corpus, while with Turo Hiltunen, Minna Palander-Collin and Helmiina Hotti we compiled our own the Reddit LGBTQ+ Corpus, with our first article focusing on the construction “identify as”.
I really got to step out of my comfort zone (in a very good way!) as I got hired to work in the LINDA project (Using Language to Interpret Nonstructured Data) with Maija Hirvonen and Tuomas Virtanen at Tampere University for 2023. With LINDA, we investigated training datasets used in language-based machine learning, focusing on natural language captions (or descriptions) which function to describe images, video and audio in written form. I learned a great deal from this project, but after a year, it was time to get on with LAIF.
Onwards with LAIF
Although I have been involved with LAIF from the get-go, I officially started in December 2023. My main task in LAIF is to conduct a national survey among Finnish-speaking Finns, investigating their attitudes towards English, more specifically, attitudes towards the influence of English on Finnish, as well as the use of English in Finland.
While this is by no means a new topic in research nor in public discourse, it seems that the discussions have gotten more divided in the past few years. That is, while some people are really embracing English and seeing it as a useful tool, others strongly believe that English is taking up too much space. Both groups include linguists and politicians, for example, and of course, other people from all walks of life. With LAIF, we want to study these attitudes towards English — although there is some previous research on the topic already, we want to produce an up-to-date, rigorous account of the contemporary situation. There will certainly be more posts about my research here, so stay tuned!
Why study language attitudes?
While some of these research topics may seem somewhat disconnected, underlying all my research is a desire to conduct socially aware and relevant research, which ultimately aims at supporting and enhancing equality.
As a sociolinguist, I examine the relationship between language and the ‘social’ in different ways, making use of both variationist approaches to explain language use and change, as well as interactionist approaches to better understand how ‘the social’ is in fact largely constructed in discourse. This helps us better understand important social phenomena, such as how our attitudes and ideologies are not only reflected but intertwined and constructed in our language use. And what difference does it make? Well, we all have attitudes about language and different ways of using language, and sometimes this means that we will also — often unconsciously — make judgments about people simply based on the way they speak. We might think, for example, that a speaker of a certain dialect or someone who does not follow standard language spelling is less intelligent. This easily leads to language discrimination. Part of the problem is that while researchers are well aware of this, regular language users often are not. And this is where I believe researchers can make a difference: by continuing to study language attitudes and ideologies, but also making it a part of the process to popularize our findings and help raise language awareness in an attempt to combat linguistic injustice.
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