Heli Paulasto

My research focuses on spoken English, regional and social variation and change, and language contacts and multilingualism. My PhD thesis dealt with the impact of the Welsh language on English language variation and change in Wales, and I continue to have an intense interest in the Englishes of the Celtic culture regions. I have also carried on studying the grammar of contact-induced varieties of English in other parts of the world using corpus methods. The central position of English as a world language means that its global variation and diversity have become important contents in English language teacher education.

More recently, I have directed my attention to English in Finland and its role as a linguistic resource in our everyday lives in different contexts, such as Eastern Finnish Twitter or multilingual community arts. I have also expanded my interest into multilingual interaction in other fields of life in Finnish society, building interdisciplinary bridges into social sciences and nursing.

Main areas of research and teaching: Language variation and change, Language contact and multilingual interaction, Sociolinguistics, World Englishes and English as a global language, English language teaching, English and multilingualism in the workplace.