English Language Contacts and Change in the Digital Age

Heli Paulasto is Senior Lecturer in English linguistics at the University of Eastern Finland. She specializes in English language contacts, variation and change in multilingual contexts. Her publications include Welsh English (de Gruyter, 2021) and English and Celtic in Contact (Routledge, 2008) as well as other publications in the fields of contact linguistics, sociolinguistics and English as a lingua franca. Her current projects involve multilingual workplace interaction.Lea Meriläinen is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interests cover second language acquisition, English language learning and teaching, learner corpora, and the interface between learner English and world Englishes from the perspective of language contact and acquisition phenomena. She has published in several peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.Samuli Kaislaniemi is a university researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. He works on Early Modern English letters and letter-writing, combining historical sociolinguistics with manuscript studies. He is a compiler of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, and a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Southeast Asian Englishes and the New Cambridge History of the English Language.Mikko Laitinen is Professor of English at the University of Eastern Finland. His research focuses on digital social networks and World Englishes. He is currently leading a project on the weak-tie hypothesis in complex digital social networks, funded by the Research Council of Finland, and recently completed a project for the Prime Minister’s Office on the role of English in Finland.