Resumen de 630 kilometres by bicycle: observations of English in urban and rural Finland
This article discusses selected observations of English usage in signage in Finland, a Nordic nation in which the significance of English has become more pronounced in recent decades. The background for this study comes from a large quantitative survey, carried out in 2007, charting the role of English in the Finnish society. One of the topic areas in this survey deals with people's encounters with English and its visibility in their daily life, and this article aims to add a qualitative angle to these results. The observations discussed here were collected in 2009 during a six-day bicycle trip from Helsinki to the regional centre of Oulu. The analysis moves from mere quantitative recording of signs to a more nuanced analysis of interpretations of their situated meanings in public spaces. These observations show that the presence of English in both urban and rural areas of the country is far from a simple phenomenon, and illustrate how charting signs in space provide valuable information on language contact situations.
