Petteri Laihonen

Petteri Laihonen

Senior Lecturer, Vice Head of Department
Unit
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department / Division
Centre for Applied Language Studies
Room number
Ag C515.3
Mobile
+358408053838
Postal address
Mattilanniemi 2
Fields of science
Humanities
6121 Languages

Biography

I serve as the Deputy Head for the Centre of Applied Language Studies (CALS) at the University of Jyväskylä (JYU), and as the Degree Program Manager for the doctoral studies at CALS. I am a member of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Board and the Human Sciences Ethics Committee at JYU.

I co-chair the FORTHEM Alliance's Multilingualism in School and Higher Education Lab, serve as Finland's Foreign Language Assessment National Expert for OECD PISA 2025, and represent JYU/FORTHEM in the CoARA Working Group on Multilingualism and Language Biases.

I am an authorized assessor for Finnish National Certificates of Language Proficiency. I have secured over a million euros in post-PhD funding. I review for national science councils and the European Commission, including Marie Curie-Skłodowska grant evaluations. I have also been a European Parliament expert twice. In 2024 October to December, I worked at the ELTE University, Budapest, granted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Distinguished Guest Fellowship Program 2024 in Hungary.

I have published in journals such as Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Language Policy, Multilingua and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. My service for journals includes: editorial board member for Multilingua; section editor for Apples – Journal for Applied Language Studies; editorial board member for Fórum Társadalomtudományi Szemle/Forum Social Science Review.board member for Hungarian Journal of Applied Linguistics; editorial board member for Magyar Nyelvjárások (‘Hungarian dialects’).

My merits in applied language studies and sociolinguistics stem from project leadership, research focus on multilingual environments, methodological innovations, and participatory approaches that bridge academic and public spheres.

Research interests

I defended my Ph.D. at JYU in 2009. In 2011, I was granted by the Academy of Finland to carry out a post-doctoral project at JYU on language ideologies among Hungarians in Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine. My Academy Research Fellowship project (2016-2022) at CALS developed new visual and digital methods for participatory data generation. In 2019-2022, I represented JYU as a researcher in the Erasmus+ Key Action: ‘TRANSLANGEDUROM – Translanguaging for Equal Opportunities: Speaking Romani at School’. In 2021-2023, I served as the JYU PI for the project ‘A European multilingual citizen science research project in co-located schools in Finland and Italy’, funded by the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland. Currently, I serve as a Citizen Science WP leader in the IMPACT project funded by the Research Council of Finland (PI Mari Honko/ CALS). I also represent JYU as a researcher in the project ‘Nordic Basic Schools as Past, Present and Future Sites for Solving the Challenges of Making Diverse Inclusive Knowledge-Based Societies’, funded by the Future Challenges in the Nordics research program. My research contributes significantly to the understanding and application of language policy in multilingual contexts and the advancement of co-creative citizen science methodologies in linguistic research.

Publications

Publication
2025
Available through Open Access
Duj dzséne.
Bodó, Csanád
Heltai, János Imre
Jenei, Kamilla
Köntös, Mihály
Laihonen, Petteri
Szakál, Sára
Székely, Márk Attila
Tarsoly, Eszter