Information about the Authors

Abstract

Jonathan BANKS is a doctoral researcher in general linguistics at the University of Helsinki. His research project is a typological investigation of the cross-linguistic phenomenon of ‘switch-reference’, a form of reference tracking across complex sentences that occurs in a significant portion of the world’s languages.

Anna BUSHEVA holds an MA from the University of Helsinki, where she studied in the Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities programme. She has participated in experimental projects and fieldwork in Estonia, India, and Romania. Her research focuses on experimental phonetics and linguistic minorities, with an MA thesis on the tonal structure of Angami, an endangered language of India. She is also interested in Slavistics and has worked with dialectal Russian and Slovak.

Raluca DIMIAN HERGHELIGIU, Hab. Assoc. Prof., is a lecturer in Romanian language at the University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia. She is a member of the editorial board of the literary journals Meridian Critic and Concordia Discors/Discordia Concors. Her research focuses on intercultural literature from Romania, France and Germany, literature and photography, and literary comparativism. Raluca Dimian has published in the field of comparative literature (Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust, intermedial authorship, German-language intercultural literature). Publications (selection): Tempus Multiformum: Literary Staging of Time in Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust, Hartung-Gorre, Konstanz (2018), Literature and Photography (1900-1950): Awakening Between East and West. Tristan Tzara, Paul Celan, Max Blecher, Gregor von Rezzori, Herta Müller, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj (2018), Herta Müller intercultural, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj, 2020.

Andrei Călin DUMITRESCU is a PhD student in the Doctoral Programme in Language Studies at the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on a grammatical description of the Meglen Vlach (Megleno-Romanian) language as spoken in the village of Óștiń (Archángelos) in Northern Greece. His interests include the description and documentation of endangered languages, linguistic typology, as well as language contact and historical linguistics, especially in relation to the languages of Southeast Europe.

Carmen DURA is a Romanian lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, Republic of Serbia. She holds degrees in literature, theology, and music from ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ University of Iași and ‘George Enescu’ National University of Arts, Iași. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled Pragmatics of Romanian Dramatic Discourse in the 20th Century, was supervised by Professor Constantin Frâncu and successfully defended at ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’ University of Iași in 2007. Her main areas of research include linguistics, particularly linguistic pragmatics, Romanian literature, with an emphasis on the works of Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania and Nicolae Steinhardt, as well as sacred music preserved in manuscripts and early printed sources.

Pavel FALALEEV is a PhD student of Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. He works as an hourly paid lecturer of Central South Slavonic at the Department of Modern Languages at the same university. Falaleev has also worked as a teacher of various Slavonic languages in the Finnish Adult Education Centers of Helsinki and Espoo. His research interests include the Slavonic languages, the Romance languages and the Balkan sprachbund. The future PhD addresses the language contact between Trentino-Venetan and Serbian in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Cristina-Elena GOGÂȚĂ holds a PhD in Philology from the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj‑Napoca, with a doctoral thesis supervised by Professor Ioana Bican, titled Ana Blandiana – A Portrait of the Intellectual in Her Time (2015). Since 2009, she has been teaching Romanian as a foreign language at the ‘Iuliu Hațieganu’ University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Cluj-Napoca, and since 2021 she has served as a Romanian language lecturer with the Romanian Language Institute (Bucharest) at the University of Pisa. Her main research interests include postwar Romanian literature, foreign language didactics, and translation studies.

Ekaterina GRUZDEVA is a Senior University Lecturer and Docent in General Linguistics at the Department of Languages, University of Helsinki. Her research covers areal typology, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, language contact, language obsolescence, revitalization, etc. She has extensive fieldwork experience, focusing on the Amuric languages spoken in the Russian Far East.

Jukka HAVU is Professor Emeritus of French at the University of Tampere (Finland). A specialist in Romance languages, he taught French and Spanish at the University of Helsinki, the Helsinki School of Economics and Business and, since 1998, at the University of Tampere. He defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Helsinki on Constitución temporal del sintagma verbal en el español contemporáneo (Temporal constitution of the Verbal Syntagma in Contemporary Spanish). From 2005 to 2010 he was the director of the Institute of Language and Translation Studies at Tampere University. Between 2010-2013, he was Dean of the New Faculty of Language, Literature and Translation Studies. In addition to his academic career, he directed the Finnish Institute in Paris from 2001 to 2004. His research interests include the study of temporal and aspectual systems in Romance languages, as well as issues related to language codification and standardisation. He has published numerous articles on these topics in several languages, notably French, Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, and English. In 2016 he was appointed Foreign Corresponding Member of the Royal Spanish Academy. 

Juha JANHUNEN is a retired professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Helsinki. Originally majoring in Finno-Ugrian Studies, he is fluent in Hungarian and German, two languages whose status he studied in Timișoara. He has written on Uralic and Altaic languages and carried out ethnolinguistic fieldwork in various parts of North, Central and East Asia.

Laura KÄÄNTEE is a Master’s student majoring in Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki, with a primary focus on Korean diaspora and secondary focus on the post-Soviet region. She holds a BA in Portuguese philology, where she researched the role of linguistics in representation. Her broader academic interests include sociocultural practices of minority groups, especially in a multilingual context. 

Ioana Mihaela MIHALEA is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She holds BA degrees in Journalism and Modern Languages, as well as an MA degree in Linguistics. With seven years of experience as a journalist, her research interests lie in media discourse and the linguistic analysis of journalistic writing styles.

Monika MURGOVÁ specialises in sociophonetics, with a focus on accent bias and accent density in Slovakia. She earned her MA in General Linguistics from the University of Helsinki and researches lesser-spoken languages and socially marginalized linguistic varieties. She has extensive experience in experimental phonetics and sociolinguistics. Her work explores how accent bias operates in post-communist societies, particularly in the context of nationalist pressures for linguistic conformity.

Anca RUSU is an assistant lecturer in the Department of Sciences and Letters at ‘George Emil Palade’ University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology of Târgu Mureș, Romania. In addition to teaching and evaluating both Romanian and foreign students, she is a PhD candidate and she is currently in the final stage of writing a doctoral thesis that will be the first monograph on Paul Zarifopol. Her research interests include Literature, Digital Humanities, Media Studies, Gender Studies and Artificial Intelligence. She has already published more than ten indexed academic articles as part of her research activity.

Anna SEDLÁČKOVÁ is an MA student in Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki and a junior researcher at the Livonian Institute of the University of Latvia. She has worked on AI-based Livonian language data synthesis and a multifunctional Livonian dictionary. She also holds an MA in East European Studies from Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on the Baltic sociolinguistics, with a special interest in minority and endangered languages, particularly Livonian, Karaim, and Võro.

Kristina SHERRILL is an MA student in Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on the Hungarian language and its language history, the influence of sociolinguistic contacts on language change, and the development of methodologies for measuring the effects of language contact on morphosyntactic language change.

Daniel TALV is a Master’s student in Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki, with a primary focus on China and a secondary interest in Eastern Europe. He holds a BA in English philology, where he explored multilingualism and the use of English as a lingua franca in educational contexts. His broader academic interests include language practices in digital environments and transnational cultural flows, especially in the context of education and minority youth. 

Mikhail ZOLOTILIN is an MA student in language technology at the University of Helsinki, specializing in language typology. His research combines fieldwork and computational methods, including machine translation models for unconventional tasks. His thesis explores language tags in multilingual models to create ‘intermediate’ language variants, focusing on language mixing in English-to-Slavic and Slavic-to-Slavic translations. He has conducted fieldwork in Romania and Kyrgyzstan and is currently working on quantitative studies on lexical diversity (using KLD metrics), surprisal and entropy in spoken texts.