I wanted to write my MA thesis on the language of literature, preferably on a writer whose language was considered difficult. I chose the Finnish modernist Volter Kilpi, who by the turn of the 1970s had received very little scholarly attention. (Since then researchers have more than made up for this!) It was Kilpi’s way with words that drew me to linguistics, and he has never really lost his hold on me.

The more you explore the borderline between linguistics and literary studies, the easier it is to notice that literature really doesn’t have a language of its own. Different authors, genres and traditions of literature use language in the same ways as the non-literary ones that are all around us; if it were otherwise, we simply wouldn’t be able to read fiction at all.

To interpret literature, we need to know the literary tradition, but the same applies to all other uses of language. Words and sentences achieve their meaning in context. Once they have been spoken or written, nothing is as it was before: both the interpretation and context of words change as we use language.

Major authors make their readers see our common language and its expressive potential from new and even surprising perspectives. This is the challenge for researchers of literary language use.

• The University of Helsinki and the National Library of Finland are digitizing classics of Finnish literature. The Klassikkokirjasto web portal (‘The library of classic works’, in Finnish) provides open access to Finnish literature for reading and research. Also works by Volter Kilpi (in Finnish) are freely available through the portal.