Affiliation: University of Helsinki, FI
Keywords: General linguistics, Language variation and universals, Language contact and change, Language and religion
Full profile:
Kaius Sinnemäki is Associate Professor in Quantitative and Comparative Linguistics at the University of Helsinki and the director of the ERC-funded project “Linguistic Adaptation: Typological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives to Language Variation“. He obtained his PhD in general linguistics at the University of Helsinki in 2011. Since then he has been a lecturer in general linguistics at the University of Tampere (2012-2013), a fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2013-2016), and Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher (2016-2019).
Sinnemäki is working mostly on language comparison, language variation and universals, and language complexity by using data from tens or hundreds of languages at the same time. The data for this kind of research typically come from large annotated corpora or from reference grammars. His current research focuses on how the social environment in which languages are learned and used may affect the way languages change over time. Recently he has co-edited a four-volume work on methodology in language sciences (in Finnish, to appear in 2020) as well as a volume on the mutual relationship of religion and society in Finland (2019) that involved collaboration with historians, social scientists, economists, theologians, and educationalists.