Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 1 August 2014-31 July 2016
Adjunct professor (docent) of English philology, University of Helsinki
Office: Atalpa 214
Email: jukka.tyrkko@uta.fi
Research interests
Jukka moved to the University of Tampere in the beginning of 2013 after spending ten years in Helsinki at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG). As a linguist and philologist, his research interests focus largely on the written word, covering a wide range of topics from lexis and phraseology to discourse studies and from book history to computer-mediated communication. A digital humanist, he often works with corpora and databases using quantitative methods and big data, and is involved with various corpus annotation and digital editing projects. On the other hand, he is also a passionate philologist and enjoys few things more than working on early printed books in dusty old scholarly libraries. The academic year 2014-5 at IASR inspired many new perspectives and ideas, particularly in regard to the analysis of political and societal discourse, and Jukka is very much looking forward to collaborating with colleagues at IASR to learn more.
Jukka’s current monograph project at IASR aims to shed light on the multilingual sociolinguistics of nineteenth century Tampere with particular reference to the Scottish and English migrants workers who were instrumental in the transformation of Tampere into the “Manchester of the North”. How did the English-speaking industrialists and foremen communicate with their Finnish workers? What was the lingua franca when Swedish-speaking factory owners and British engineers discussed plans to extend a factory — or when they greeted each other on a Sunday afternoon? Did Finnish factory workers use English loan words and did the English foremen learn to swear in Finnish? Using archival sources in conjunction with digital humanities methods such as relational databases and social network analysis, this study is intended to make a contribution to the growing field of historical multilingualism.
Jukka is a member of the Multilingual Practices in the History of Written English project here in Tampere. His other ongoing projects include editing a volume on lexical bundles with Dr. Joanna Kopaczyk (Edinburgh), developing a corpus tool called Multilingualiser, and researching the history of reading with Dr. Ilkka Mäkinen (Tampere). He is also one of the compilers of the forthcoming Late Modern English Medical Texts