Väinö Syrjälä

Väinö Syrjälä

PhD

Senior Lecturer

PhD, senior lecturer in Swedish language. Also working within teacher education and the Study Support Unit. Research within Linguistic Landscape studies and socio-onomastics.

+46 8 608 47 61 +4686084761

Culture and Education

PB210

I have worked as Senior lecturer in Swedish language at Södertörn university since 2019. My background is within the field of Scandinavian languages; I got my PhD from the University of Helsinki in 2018 on a thesis about the linguistic landscapes in bilingual Finland. I have a broad interest for issues within sociolinguistics and onomastics.

Research interests
My research has mainly focused on linguistic landscapes, the visible language use in public spaces. I have studied the linguistic landscape from different perspectives: with focus on name use, perceptions of language users, the status of Swedish language in Finland, etc. I’m especially interested in the relation between linguistic landscapes, space and place, and those inhabiting/using these places. My latest projects discuss such questions from different theoretical perspectives to investigate what the linguistic landscape can tell us about more monolingual places (in Sweden).

Furthermore, I have an interest in socio-onomastics, i.e. the sociolinguistic/
pragmatic research on proper names, with a specific focus on urban names (urban place names and commercial names). I have for example discussed the role of names in (historical and present day) linguistic landscapes and the use of less studies names (such as names of bus stops).

My complete publications list is available here: link External link, opens in new window..

Teaching and supervision
I’m currently teaching different courses and supervising bachelor’s thesis both within the subject Swedish and within Teacher Education.

I'm the head of Study Support Unit ("Studieverkstan") since August 2022, also working with courses and guidance on academic writing.


DiVA (Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet) is Södertörn University's system for digital publishing and for registering publications produced by researchers, teachers and students.

To DiVA

The researcher is not participating in any projects at this moment.