When the topic of administrative language comes up in public, Ulla Tiililä, a consulting officer at the Institute for the Languages of Finland, says the tone is often combative and reproachful.

Working on administrative language at the Institute for the Languages of Finland is above all a question of influencing society. It not only requires expertise in language use but also knowledge of public administration as well as networking and contacts with various interest groups. Influencing society is therefore both the end and the means of our operations.

My work requires me to jump from one group of experts to another, and the majority of my collaborators are from fields outside linguistics. That is why it is important to not only put the results of research to concrete use but also to make one’s own field comprehensible to others.

As a scholar I feel I am more focused on the use of language than language itself. I specialise in textual research and written official texts, which I have studied inter alia from the perspective of dialogue. I have never understood the study of interactive communication as purely referring to oral communication. Dialogue is not far from intertextuality, which is a recurrent theme in my research, and intertextuality is related to the study of paraphrasing and rhetoric and the examination of power relations: what is taken from one text to be used in another and what it is used for.

When I’m asked for my best memory at the university, the first thing that comes to mind are Auli Hakulinen’s lectures and her teaching and instruction in general. So the best memories are related to the intellectual side, to sources of inspiration and realisation. Dr Hakulinen managed to have an effect on me on every course where I participated.