Sociolinguistics in Finland: A brief overview of the discipline

In this article the aim is to provide an overview of current sociolinguistic research and its trends in Finland. In compiling this overview I decided not to rely on a priori definitions of sociolinguistics. Instead, the article uses an exploratory methodology whereby I collected information on work done by individual scholars and research groups that define or represent their work as sociolinguistic. To me, this approach allows for a broader and more inclusive view on sociolinguistic phenomena and research than would be possible on the basis of a predetermined notion of sociolinguistics. In addition, this approach is also motivated by the fact that the whole of the field of sociolinguistics continues to diversify, with the emergence of new questions and topics for investigation (e.g. language and globalization) as well as dynamic interand cross-disciplinary cross-fertilizations of topics (e.g. the impact of cultural studies on sociolinguistic study of identity or the improvement of publicly available mega-corpora with sophisticated quering functions that make use a range of independent variables). That said, it is also acknowledged that no state-of-the art account of a research field can fully cover all the on-going and germinating work and I apologize if I have failed to include work which, currently, is not yet quite visible in terms of published output, for example. This overview is based on information from publications and materials available on individual and project homepages, and I have done my best when trying to interpret what is there.