My research focus is on various ideals and ideologies related to language use, particularly to spoken language and interaction, and attitudes toward speakers. Studying these ideologies and attitudes helps identifying them, which in turn enables understanding them and, potentially, dismantling and unlearning them. For example, I have studied why the construct of the so-called “Helsinkian s-pronunciation” ,dating back to the 19th century, remains going strong, even though the pronunciation does not actually differ from that of any other region’s s-sound, and how so-called “foreign accents” influence both our everyday attitudes and the assessment of language proficiency in high-stakes language proficiency tests.
I’m interested in how something that is said often affects interaction and activities as much as or more than what is said. Although, and precisely because, language-related attitudes and ideals often remain hidden beneath the surface of interaction and for this reason are difficult to study, they are nevertheless always present and affect everyone. There is no escape, which is why they need to be studied.
As a senior researcher, I have also studied many other topics related to language and interaction. I approach language always as social action, sociolinguistically. My research methods have included, for example, conversation and discourse analysis, as well as auditory and somewhat also acoustic analysis of speech.
