Research Project on Spoken Finnish in Turku in the 2020s
The project investigates inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation and change of spoken Finnish in the Turku region. The study involves collecting linguistic data from individuals living in Turku and the surrounding region. With participants’ consent, speech is recorded in various communicative contexts, and their perceptions of language are explored through surveys. The newly collected data from different Turku residents will be compared internally and further contrasted with datasets from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as with past and present language use among other Finnish speakers. The aim is to construct a representative overview of contemporary language use in Turku and to examine residents’ perceptions and attitudes regarding language, dialects, and colloquial speech.
The project builds upon earlier initiatives, including the Turku spoken language subproject launched by Matti K. Suojanen in 1976, and the nationwide Finnish Dialect Follow-up project coordinated by the Institute for the Languages of Finland, which was recently discontinued. No systematic study of Turku dialect (or Turku Colloquial) has been carried out for over forty years.
Research Project on Spoken Finnish in Turku in the 2020s
