Browsing by Author "Tuominen, Jere"

This study has the intention of seeing whether Finnish English (FiE) resembles American (AmE) or British English (BrE) more. With that in mind, the two research questions focus on these two sides, first in what are the differences between BrE and AmE, as seen in written form data, and second in how these differences are seen in FiE in terms of which of the two FiE resembles more. Generally speaking, FiE has not been studied extensively and insofar as it has been studied, the current research is mostly been in more sociological domains, examining who use it and where and what is the status of English in Finland and so on. And with that in mind, this study has a more linguistic aim, in that by examining some unique aspects in AmE and BrE, I am trying to determine whether FiE aligns more with BrE or AmE. To do so, keywords and elements are gathered from literature (Algeo (2006) and Darragh (2000)) where differences have been observed. These differences are categorized into three larger groups: spellings, word forms (meaning single word differences larger than just spelling, for example, pronunciation, where meaning is still largely synomatic) and phrases and constructions (meaning multi-word formations). The key elements are first subjected to verification corpora, one in both variants to establish the characteristics and to discover how correct Darragh’s and Algeo’s estimation of differences truly are. When the differences have been established, three FiE corpora are used to likewise discover the same aspects in FiE. The results from FiE corpora are then compared with the results from BrE and AmE corpora to see possible similarities, connections, and differences between them. The results from the study are that at least the academic FiE was a lot like BrE. However, FiE had some aspects where in the tested sets BrE showed some unique characteristics, such as a strong influence of either French or Latin, and in these cases FiE did not resemble BrE, but was more akin to AmE. FiE does also share much of the modernized characteristics of AmE and when it came apparent that for any tested word or phrase a universal version was favored, FiE did not show any deviation from the larger variants. The probable reasoning behind ties with what was discovered in the background research, in the forementioned sociological studies, where the Finnish people had a highly pragmatic approach when it comes to their language use, and as such, it is to be expected that FiE is not simply an offspring of either of the two larger variants, but strives for the most understandable and modern style.