Petteri Laihonen

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General description

My current merits in applied language studies and sociolinguistics stem from project leadership, research focus on multilingual environments, methodological innovations, and participatory approaches that bridge academic and public spheres. In 2024 October to December, I serve as a Distinguished Guest Fellow funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at the ELTE University in Budapest, Hungary.

I co-chair the FORTHEM Alliance's Multilingualism in School & Higher Education Lab, serve as Finland's Foreign Language Assessment National Expert for OECD PISA 2025, and represent JYU in the CoARA Working Group on Multilingualism and Language Biases.

I serve as a debuty member for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Board and for the Human Sciences Ethics Committee of the University of Jyväskylä. I am an authorized assessor for Finnish National Certificates of Language Proficiency. I have secured over a million euros in post-PhD funding. I review for national science councils and the European Commission, including Marie Curie-Skłodowska grant evaluations. I have also been a European Parliament expert twice.

My service for journals: advisory board member for Alkalmazott nyelvtudomany Hungarian Journal of Applied Linguistics; editorial board member for Magyar Nyelvjárások (‘Hungarian dialects’); Editorial board member for Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication; editor for Apples – Journal for Applied Language Studies; Editorial board member for Fórum Társadalomtudományi Szemle/ Forum Social Science Review.

Academic qualifications

The title of docent, Kieli-ideologioiden ja kielipolitiikan tutkimus, 01/11/2013 (Centre for Applied Language Studies)

Active JYU affiliations

Centre for Applied Language Studies, Senior Lecturer

Previous, inactive or other affiliations

Centre for Applied Language Studies (University of Jyväskylä), Academy Research Fellow, Ended
Centre for Applied Language Studies (University of Jyväskylä), Senior Researcher, Ended

Eötvös Loránd University, Visiting researcher, Other affiliation

Research interests

I defended my Ph.D. at the University of Jyväskylä in 2009. My theses included a notable article in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, which significantly influenced the methodology for the qualitative analysis of interviews. In 2011 I was granted by the Academy of Finland to carry out a post-doctoral project at the University of Jyväskylä on language ideologies among Hungarians in Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine. The fieldwork and data resulted to significant insights into the qualitative study of Linguistic Landscapes in the minority regions.
My Academy Research Fellowship project (2016-2022) at CALS, JYU developed new visual and digital methods for participatory data generation, which I utilized to engage young people in meaningful activities during a language revitalization program in Romania.
In 2019-2022, I represented JYU as a researcher in the Erasmus+ Key Action, Strategic Partnerships for higher education: ‘TRANSLANGEDUROM – Translanguaging for Equal Opportunities: Speaking Romani at School’. In 2021-2023 I served as the JYU PI for the project ‘A European multilingual citizen science research project in co-located schools in Finland and Italy’, funded by the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.
Currently, I represent JYU as a researcher in the project ‘Nordic Basic Schools as Past, Present and Future Sites for Solving the Challenges of Making Diverse Inclusive Knowledge-Based Societies’ funded by the Future Challenges in the Nordics research program.
My current work contributes significantly to the understanding and application of language policy in multilingual contexts and the advancement of co-creative citizen science methodologies in linguistic research.