Current projects:
FINGEL — Gender exclusive and inclusive language in Finnish
During 2021 and 2022 I worked at the University of Jyväskylä on my first postdoctoral project focuses on gender exclusive and inclusive language in Finnish. In 2024 I received funding as an Academy research fellow for FINGEL from the Research council of Finland, allowing me to focus on this project for the next four years. With both survey and corpus data, I map current usage of gendered and nongendered occupational titles (e.g., palomies or pelastaja ‘fireman/firefighter’) and investigate attitudes towards inclusive and exclusive language use in Finnish. You can learn more about the project in my research blog (in Finnish).
LAIF — Language Awareness and Ideologies in Finland
Funded by the Kone Foundation, the LAIF project delves into current language attitudes and ideologies in Finland. My main task in the project will be to conduct a national survey which aims at discovering what type of attitudes Finns have towards the status of English in Finland. Certainly, there is much to discover as the topic seems to regularly incite strong feelings in public discourse. For more information, visit our LAIF website and blog!
Other post doctoral projects
LINDA — Using Language to Interpret Nonstructured Data
For 2023, I worked full time as a postdoctoral reseacher in the LINDA project at Tampere University, under the supervision of tenure track professor Maija Hirvonen and professor Tuomas Virtanen. My research tasks center on investigating natural language captions (or descriptions) which function to describe images, video and audio in written form. Our first article on the datasets used in language-based machine perception is available open access!
Smaller postdoctoral projects
In collaboration with professor Minna Palander-Collin, Docent Turo Hiltunen, and research assistant Helmiina Hotti we have compiled the Reddit LGBTQ+ Corpus (ca. 44 million words). In our first article we examined the textual functions of the construction identify as (2024).
Together with doctoral researcher Ylva Biri and professor Minna Palander-Collin we have investigated online verbal aggression in the NETLANG corpus (2023).
I have also collaborated with members of the Swedish Gender Fair Language Research Group on a study testing whether there still is a male bias in gender-neutral pronouns in grammatically genderless languages, Finnish and Turkish.
PhD: Generic and Nonbinary pronouns
My PhD dissertation examined generic and nonbinary pronouns in English. Exploring both usage of and attitudes towards these pronouns, the dissertation provides a nuanced understanding of the reasons behind the ongoing changes occurring in 3rd person singular generic and nonbinary pronouns. The dissertation includes a chapter on nonbinary pronouns and their relevance to identity construction (Chapter 12). The dissertation is available online. For a lighter read, feel free to explore my PhD research blog.
Laura Hekanaho 