International scope

• The teachers are internationally widely connected experts in their respective fields;
• The programme functions in English and accepts international students from all countries;
• The programme recruits students representing a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds;
• You are encouraged to study and master many languages from both the practical and the theoretical points of view;
• If you are following the study track in linguistics, you are encouraged to get engaged in fieldwork among speakers of little documented languages in various parts of the world;
• If you are following the study track in cognitive science or phonetics, your experimental project work ties in with research projects with international collaborations. The best student work and theses often lead to international publications.
• If you decide to study digital humanities, you get to collaborate with interdisciplinary groups and work with students and scholars from various universities and countries. Our annual flagship course functions also as Clarin and Dariah summer school attracting students from dozens of countries.
• Selecting language technology opens the possibility to participate in research projects with an international network leading to joint work and publications.
• You are encouraged to use the opportunities of international exchange that the university offers, with the help of the teachers' contact networks.

As regards Linguistics, it is by definition an international field. Capacity for language is a feature common to all human beings, and the objective of linguistics as a science is to study both the universal background of language as a phenomenon and the global diversity of languages as expressions of social and cultural heritage. At the University of Helsinki, linguistics became highly international already in the 19th century. Finland is a country where, in particular, ethnolinguistics and field linguistics were developed and practised much earlier than in most other European countries. Some of the regions where Finnish ethnolinguists have been active include North and Central Eurasia, the Near and Middle East, East Asia, South Asia, and Africa. This tradition of field-work-oriented linguistics is today carried on by the HALS (Helsinki Area and Linguistic Studies) research community. Linguistic diversity is a central theme in contemporary linguistics and with its strong, uninterrupted tradition, linguistics in Helsinki is at the forefront of this growing field.

Cognitive Science and Phonetics research groups have vibrant international connections (see Research groups in cognitive science and Phonetics and Speech Synthesis). Projects often need research assistants, and the groups offer topics and supervision for master’s theses. So as a CogSci or Phonetics student, you can participate in research on international projects, already at the undergraduate level.

As an example of the multidisciplinary and international atmosphere in Digital Humanities, our annual Helsinki Digital Humanities Hackathon attracted in 2019 students from 19 different universities globally.  Also other courses are organised as project courses together with multidisciplinary research groups,  so if you are interested in new methodological approaches to history or studying the digital world, this track is for you.

The research group in Language Technology is an established member of the international network of experts in computational linguistics. Our projects run in collaboration with other researchers worldwide and we have a tradition of involving students in our work and scientific events. Joint publications frequently lead to participation in international conferences and workshops.

In general, the teachers and students of the programme interact actively and in many different ways with other universities, research centres and institutions abroad, both in the public sector and NGOs. Find out more about co-op­er­a­tion and stud­ies with other parties.