Päivi Pahta

English in Finland: globalisation, language awareness and questions of identity

THIS ARTICLE discusses present trends in the use of English in Finland, paying attention to the specific sociohistorical character of the country with its long history of Finnish-Swedish bilingualism. It has been argued that the other Nordic countries are developing from EFL to ESL countries; is Finland heading the same way? If so, at what stage is the process? We shall first give a brief overview of the theoretical background and of the historical development of the language situation in Finland. The present state of the use of English is outlined next, with the focus on education and on areas where the danger of domain loss is most imminent. At the end we discuss the ongoing changes in terms of the identity-forming function of language and the present diffusion in which the national language does not necessarily play a traditional role.

Placing Middle English in context

This collection of articles reflects the present state of the art in Middle English linguistics. Internal processes of linguistic change are assessed in their context in relation to sociohistorical, sociocultural, textual, situational, as well as regional and contact-based factors causing variation in language. Many articles combine two or more approaches to analysis and tackle questions of change through the new methodological tools offered by corpora, thesauri, and atlases. A systematic use of these sources for linguistic evidence will add to our knowledge of the variable character of Middle English and enable us to revise our earlier views of the developments at this stage of the English language.

Vernacularisation of medical writing in English: a corpus-based study of scholasticism.

This article proposes a model for linguistic analysis of scientific thought-styles, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses in the variationist frame and focusing on writings of the scholastic period. The first part of the article considers factors that led to the vernacularisation of scientific writings in fifteenth-century England and the sources, underlying traditions and audiences of these writings. The empirical part focuses on two features typical of scholasticism: references to authorities and the use of prescriptive phrases. The results show statistical differences between varieties of writing. A close semantic analysis reveals a pattern which is related to the underlying layers of tradition and to the sociohistorical background of the texts. The material comes from a computer-readable Corpus of Early English Medical Writing 1375-1750, which the authors are compiling at the University of Helsinki.

From global language use to local meanings: English in Finnish public discourse

In 2002, Tom McArthur, then editor of English Today , visited Helsinki and asked Irma Taavitsainen and Paivi Pahta whether the use of English in Finland was becoming more like its Nordic neighbours. In an article in ET76 they answered with a cautious ‘yes’. Now the authors provide us with an update, with examples of how English is currently used in Finnish public communication.

Finnish Culture and Language Endangered — Language Ideological Debates on English in the Finnish Press from 1995 to 2007

In Finland, foreign languages have frequently been the focus of impassioned public debates — this is evinced in many of the chapters in this volume. In this attitudinal climate English is no exception. In the press, for example, this anxiety manifests itself in frequent avalanches of worry, suspicion and irritation. In these, English is typically depicted as a clear and present danger that can seriously disrupt the purity of the Finnish language and culture. What often seems to lie behind these concerns is a deep-rooted language ideology of the national language/s as a key defining the nation state and determining national and cultural identity and integrity.

Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700-1800: A corpus for analysing eighteenth-century medical English

Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700-1800 : A corpus for analysing eighteenth-century medical English

Circumstantial adverbials in discourse: a synchronic and a diachronic perspective

This study discusses adverbials of circumstance introduced by the grammaticalised connectives seeing and considering in electronic corpora ranging from those on Presentday English (British National Corpus, BNC; International Corpus of English - Great Britain, ICE-GB) to diachronic corpora (Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, HCOS; Corpus of Scottish Correspondence, CSC; Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, CEEM). We claim that it is relevant to distinguish ‘circumstance’ from other semantic roles of contingency. Chiefly because of their thematic potential, circumstantial adverbials can be used in specific functions in genres as different from one another as ‘letter’ and ‘medical treatise’.

9. The social and textual embedding of multilingual practices in Late Modern English: A corpus-based analysis

The social and textual embedding of multilingual practices in Late Modern English : A corpus-based analysis

Advertising as multilingual communication

Helen Kelly-Holmes , Advertising as multilingual communication . Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiv, 206. Hb

Reviews : English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. By David Denison. London: Longman, 1993

69.95. Language choices in advertising are never random. They represent an attempt to use language to achieve a particular goal. In commercial advertising the goal is, ultimately, to sell. The words that are present in advertisements are the product of a very conscious decision to put those particular words there rather than other words. Helen Kelly-Holmes in her fascinating book examines choices that have resulted in the use, non-use or, as it turns out, abuse of features from more than one language in commercially driven discourses. The object of her study is multilingual advertising communication, defined as the appearance of a number of different languages or voices in a market-discourse situation. For Kelly-Holmes, the market-discourse situation, deliberately chosen as the context of analysis instead of more narrow frames like the speech act, covers a range of possibilities from advertising texts to TV channels and Internet sites. The manifestations of languages or voices in these situations can range from single words to entire texts. Thus, taking examples from my own everyday context, a Finnish-language TV advertisement for a car ending in the English slogan Fresh thinking – better cars would count as a multilingual market-discourse situation, as would a setting where a TV ad entirely in Finnish is followed by an all-English advertisement for a particular cider, a perfume ad with only one word of French in an otherwise Finnish publication, or an advertisement where the “language” is an accent or a dialect, such as the use of Italian-accented Finnish to advertise pasta sauce.