The attitude towards English language in Finland is generally positive, and English is widely mixed with Finnish. How does this show in a social media environment? We set out to shed some light on this issue by looking at the Jodel app that has lately been gaining popularity in Finland. Jodel is an app that allows users in a relatively small area to communicate with each other by sending anonymous, short and public messages. The app is mainly used by students, so the topics discussed are rather familiar to us as well. We observed the messages in the Jodel app for several weeks and picked out messages, or “Jodels” that had English in them. The gathered messages were then analysed for themes in both content and the use of English.
On content side, we found several familiar (at least to young adults and students) themes, such as dating, pop culture references and procrastinating. In all of these categories, many Jodels could be found which contained English. However, no clear themes were visible for how English was used, but instead English was used in multitude of ways. Most prominent seemed to be to use phrases, although single words were used as well. It also seemed like English was often used at the ends of messages, however this was not the vast majority of the cases and English phrases and words were located in various parts of a message. Some Jodels were even written completely in English.
How about the reasons? Why do Finns use code-switching and language mixing in their social media communication? This was a difficult question to answer as well. We assumed the reasons relate to the demographic of the app, young adults and students, and also to the prominent role of English in Finland. Using English to create humor or belonging to a certain group could also be probable reasons. Our role of observers and the anonymous nature of Jodel prevented us from finding out more conclusive evidence, but we did manage to gather and present some interesting data on how English is used in Finnish social media environment. Given more time, a larger study could be conducted on this very contemporary topic, and perhaps from a larger set of data the English usage trends would be more visible, if indeed there are any.
Link to the full article coming shortly
English in Finland 