Now I have to brag a bit about my MA students. The name of the course is “English in Finland,” which of course can be interpreted quite widely — that was the point. The students are all completing their MA theses in the Department of Modern Languages in the English program. They are an incredible group!

At this point, there are eight brave souls who have stuck with it. I want to to tell you about their topics. At the outset, I think it is worth mentioning that there are some advantages to studying a language at a distance from its native speakers, or what might be considered its “home.” This psychological distance is very important for the students in our program, opening up opportunities for research that simply would not be possible in, say, the US or the UK. They just don’t have all that baggage. You’ll soon find out what I mean.

Without naming any student names, here are the topics:
1) The role of English for Middle Eastern asylum seekers in Finland, based on interview data
2) The use of prepositions in written English by native speakers of Finnish, based on a corpus of essays from upper secondary school students
3) English-Finnish codeswitching in a community of Finnish snowboarders, based on recorded conversations
4) How the word yes has been appropriated into Finnish (written as jees, in case you are wondering): what it means in Finnish compared to English, who uses it, and why, based on online data
5) How children at an English language daycare in Finland self-regulate, how they create patterns of use, who monitors their language
6) A comparison of the total amount of spoken language of African American actors vs actors of other backgrounds in 13 Oscar-winning “Black” films (I bet you can guess the student’s results…)
7) A comparison and account of the terms refugee, asylum seeker and migrant in English-language press in Finland, before and after the current immigrant changes
8) A survey evaluation of Finnish and Swedish speakers’ attitudes and social understanding of ethnic terms in English (including some very derogatory ones!): African-American, American Indian, Black, Chinaman, Cracker, Eskimo, Jap, Jew, Jewish, Kike, Mulatto, Native American, Nigger, Paki, Redskin, and White trash. I understand that this list has a lot of shock value; rest assured that the goal of the study is to make sure that students are taught which of these terms are OK to use and which ones are not–and why.