Professor of English, Anna Mauranen, is one of the University’s most internationally cited researchers.

Over the last three decades Mauranen has made a strong showing among the elite of English-language researchers: she began work on her doctoral thesis at the age of forty, gaining her doctorate after three years, and then after a further three years took up the Chair of Translation Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. Since 2005 Anna Mauranen has been professor of English at the University of Helsinki.

For the past fifteen years Mauranen has been fully engaged in research on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). By lingua franca is meant a contact language that speakers use when they don’t otherwise share a common language.

“In our globalised world, English belongs to us all. No-one can claim exclusive rights.

Helsinki has grown as a centre for ELF research, which involves a great deal of international co-operation. Working with the University of Southampton in the UK, we are currently examining linguistic diversity on international university campuses.

At the University of Stockholm a project is underway to study people’s use of English as a lingua franca in digital environments, such as blogs, discussion forums and the twittersphere.

“People who use English as a lingua franca in digital environments seem to have a good understanding of each other. Comprehension is more important than a perfect command of the grammatical rules, and speakers are highly adept when it comes to exploiting the range of language and conversational strategies to achieve mutual understanding.

Another of Anna Mauranen’s focal interests concerns language theory. In 2006, together with the late John Sinclair, Mauranen constructed the Linear Unit Grammar model. This proposes that the idea that language use is fundamentally linear and is made up of units which are not invariably individual words or clauses, but often something in between. The models arising from this paradigm are now being tested in collaboration with neuroscientists at the University.