Lotta Aarikka
Postdoctoral Researcher
PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, Finnish language
School of Humanities, Philosophical Faculty
I am currently working on a post-doc project funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, In the Footsteps of a Scientific Nomad, where I am researching Lauri Kettunen and his Suomen murteet (‘Finnish Dialects’) series. Lauri Kettunen (1885–1963) was a prolific researcher and field worker and, among others, a professor of Estonian and its related languages at the University of Helsinki. In addition to my research, my goal is to write a non-fiction book about Lauri Kettunen. I work with archival material and literature, but I also gather oral history about Lauri Kettunen from the scientific community and other respondents.
In 2023–2025 I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland in a research project “Linguistic variation, social class and experiences on inequality in Eastern Finland” (LINSOC). The project is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s North Karelia and North Savo funds.
The subject of my dissertation (June 2023, University of Turku) “Dialect and its study: Perspectives on the history and language ideologies of Finnish dialectological research 1871–2017” is dialect and how dialect has been studied in the field of the Finnish language. In addition to the research-historical perspective, I dealt with language ideologies related to dialect research. My dissertation is graded “with commendation”, which requires that the research represents the top ten percent of its field.
