Browsing by Author "Syrjä, Suvi"

Just north of the centre of Helsinki lies the district of Kallio, that has a unique atmosphere due to the dense housing and working class history of the district. Part of Kallio’s identity is a certain kind of edginess that originates from district’s old reputation as a restless area at the edge of the city centre. Kallio’s facelift and the possible gentrification has been discussed in the media and in scientific literature for decades. Kallio has been labelled as a hipster district from the early 2000s onwards. The purpose of this master’s thesis is to examine what kind of features the names of Kallio’s licensed premises possess, what kind of a message the names communicate and also determine if the changes of the restaurant namescape can be linked to the development of the district. A feature connected to gentrification is the upscaling of services in the area. The length of the restaurants’ lifespan changes as consuming patterns evolve, so any changes in the namescape of restaurants reflect the changes of the surrounding area and society. The research material consists of 270 names of the licensed premises in the Kallio area in 2005, 2008, 2014 and 2019. The names were divided into several different categories by the method of content analysis to examine the underlying trends in naming. Four themes emerged, and those themes were analysed separately. The study also looked at the epithets used in the names, the prevalence of persons and characters in the names and the puns the names possessed. It can be concluded from the study results that the namescape of Kallio’s restaurants has evolved to be more international, which hints at the possibility that the changes are linked to gentrification. The popularity of Finnish names has reduced, and the popularity of English names has risen significantly. Popular ways to name a restaurant were names connected to location of the restaurant and names that mentioned foods or drinks. The use of epithets reduced and the number of names that had puns increased.