Heli Paulasto

Ever since my undergraduate days, I have been fascinated by spoken language, dialects, and language contact, and the diverse ways in which the English language changes and varies. I completed my PhD on Welsh language influence in the grammar of Welsh English in 2006 and 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 am currently expanding my interest into multilingual interaction in other fields of life in Finnish society and building interdisciplinary bridges into social sciences.

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.