This article introduces the Finnish Corpus of Online Registers (FinCORE) representing the full range of registers – situationally defined text varieties such as news and blogs – on the Finnish Internet. The extreme range of language use found online has challenged the study of registers. It has been unclear what registers the entire Internet includes, and if they can be sufficiently defined to allow for their analysis or classification, previous studies focusing on restricted sets of registers and English. FinCORE features 10,754 texts from the unrestricted web, manually annotated for their register using a scheme originally established for the Corpus of Online Registers of English (CORE). We present the FinCORE registers and compare them to CORE. Finally, we show that the FinCORE registers are sufficiently well-defined to allow for their automatic identification, thus opening novel possibilities for both linguistics and web-as-corpus research. FinCORE is published under an open license.

This study presents results of two experiments using supervised machine-learning models to examine individual Finnish speakers’ dialectal backgrounds. Data come from interviews conducted with heritage speakers of Finnish in northern Wisconsin and are compared to data from the Finnish Dialect Syntax Archive. The models were constructed and then, following successful validation testing, used to identify the dialectal background of five individual American Finnish speakers. Results showed individual variation in dialectal backgrounds and some correlation to speakers’ likely language input. Our approach offers a new methodological tool for examining speakers’ dialectal backgrounds in situations of language contact.

Decades of research on bilingual grammars corroborate the integrated nature of these systems, leading to the conjecture that these representations are ‘shared’ (Marian & Spivey 2003, Kroll & Gollan 2014, Putnam et al. 2018). A specific population of bilinguals, namely heritage language speakers, shows a tendency for highly variable allomorphy (Polinsky 2018, Putnam et al. 2021); however, with this aspect of grammar that is often in a state of flux, there are instances of stability. Here we thoroughly investigate the stability of tense allomorphy of in North American Norwegian (NAmNo), a moribund heritage language spoken in the Upper Midwestern United States. Formally, we build upon initial observations provided by Lykke (2020), showing how a late-insertion approach to the syntax–phonological interface in combination with events, features, and precedence (EFP) phonology (Raimy 2000, Papillon 2020, Idsardi 2022) provides a straightforward account of the structural complexities that determine exponency in bilingual grammars.

The focus of this article is on OKAY as a resource for regulating language and constructing norm centres in authentic consultation meetings related to academic writing and recorded in Finland and Sweden. It gives an overview of all occurrences of OKAY in the interactional data in question, revealing that the word occurs frequently in academic writing consultations in Finnish, Finland Swedish, and Sweden Swedish. There are similarities in the frequency of its use and the distribution of occurrences between counsellor and student in the Finnish and the Finland-Swedish data, whereas the Sweden-Swedish counselling interactions follow a slightly different pattern. Through the lens of conversation analysis and systemic–functional linguistics, we further demonstrate how the counsellors and the students use the evaluative content word OKAY as a resource for regulating both academic writing and the counselling interaction, and thereby position themselves epistemically and orient towards different centres of norms.