Browsing by Author "Huhtala, Niko"

This MA thesis explores the use of English on Instagram in the Finnish capital region that consists of the municipalities of Helsinki, Vantaa, Espoo and Kauniainen. Building on previous research on Virtual Linguistic Landscapes and English as a lingua franca, this thesis investigates the extent to which English is used in the study area and how different types of areas and locations differ in terms of English use in the study area. For this purpose, I use geotagged social media data and methods from the fields of natural language processing and geoinformatics. Firstly, I analyse the general linguistic make-up of the study area to understand the use of English in relation to other languages. Secondly, I analyse and compare how the use of English and Finnish are spread geographically across the Finnish capital region on Instagram and identify spatial clusters by means of spatial autocorrelation analysis. Lastly, I seek to provide further insights into the different types of locations where English, Finnish and other languages are used by using the Corine Land Cover inventory for categorising different types of locations. The results of this study show that the English language has a very strong presence as the second most used language in the Virtual Linguistic Landscape of the Finnish capital region. English is used especially often by users who use more than one language on Instagram. The spatial patterns of English use show that the language is used particularly often in the Helsinki city centre, western Helsinki and eastern Espoo and least in north-eastern Helsinki and Vantaa. English has a strong presence in essentially all the studied location types, especially in commercial and urban contexts. The relative proportions of English use are highest at airport areas and lowest in various sport and leisure facilities, where Finnish is used significantly more than any other language. In the analysis, I also include frequent observations on Finnish and other languages, which provide further insights into the rich Virtual Linguistic Landscape of the capital city region.