Hello/ Terve!
Thank you very much for taking your time to read through this. My name is Walther Glödstaf and I am a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am contacting you to see if you, or anyone you know might be interested in participating in my thesis research project regarding whether changes in the native language of long-term immigrants can be simulated through language-switching experiments.

The experiment targets Finnish speakers who:
- grew up with Finnish and finished at least high school in Finland.
- moved and have lived in USA, Canada, Australia or Estonia for ca. 10 years or more.
- Who speak and read English or Estonian (if you live in Estonia).

If you grew up in Finland from pre-school age *6yo or younger), speaking Estonian at home, but went to a Finnish school, you are also eligible!

Please feel free to share this email with anyone you know who might be interested in participating. If you or anyone you know wants to participate, please contact me at this email address ([email protected]) so I can enroll you in the experiment with a personal link.

Participation would entail participating in 2 online survey-based experiments (two weeks apart from each other) that take about 2-3 hours for both experiments in total. You would be reimbursed with a 10USD Amazon voucher (or its equivalent in your local currency). The voucher reimbursement can be done on any Amazon store of your choosing.

The reason I am looking particularly at Finnish speakers is because I myself grew up with speaking Finnish abroad, and also because the research status of Finnish in contact with other languages is under-researched and often based on research on languages that are quite dissimilar to Finnish. It is my hope that with your help, this research could help families who live abroad but speak Finnish at home to i) understand how certain changes in their language might come about (do the changes come from intense exposure to ‘the societal majority language’ or from not enough exposure to Finnish, or both?) and ii) how to maintain Finnish as a minority language in these families and communities (can changes be reversed by more contact with Finnish for instance).

Thank you very much for your time in trying to help me with this project. Without your generous help this would not be possible! If you have any questions regarding the experiment, my research, and/or participation, you can always reach me under this email address. If you also are more comfortable asking your questions in Finnish, I can also answer them of course in Finnish.

Best wishes/Paljon kiitoksia
Walther Glödstaf
Linguistics Predoc Fellow, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science

Subject Language(s): Finnish (fin)