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This paper presents results of a national survey conducted in Finnish high schools investigating language variation and change. The study is part of the project LANGAWARE (Tampere University, 2023-25), which examines how language users of different backgrounds perceive variation of Finnish in their everyday life-worlds, in face-to-face encounters and online environments.

The current work builds on a 60-year-old tradition of studies on sociolinguistic variation in Finnish and continues the follow-up of language change with perceptual methods. By involving both L1 and L2 users of Finnish, the study also broadens the scope of longitudinal studies on Finnish. The survey data was collected in 2023-2024 among high school students from the same dialect regions (Itkonen 1989) that earlier real-time corpora have been collected from with interview methods. There were in total 17 target locations, eight of which are cities and nine are smaller municipalities. The survey was completed by 1038 respondents with their consents.

The survey design is based on quantitative and qualitative methodology, combining elements from sociolinguistic perceptual research traditions (e.g., Preston 2013; Kristiansen 2020). The questionnaire was based on mainly reaction tasks (attitude rating scales) and self-report tasks, in order to get a view of the current variation situation across the rural and urban Finnish speaking societies from the language users’ perspective. Additionally, some open-ended questions are included to elicit bottom-up perspectives on dynamics of variation in face-to-face and digitally mediated environments. The respondents are invited, in a spirit of Citizen Science, to report on their own observations on language variation and change, and to point out linguistic phenomena they find salient or interesting to study.

The focus of this presentation will be on the quantitative results concerning self-reports of linguistic variable usage. The respondents were asked to report on their own use of linguistic variables with Likert scales. The variables are selected based on previous research knowledge, with the emphasis on mostly morpho-phonological variables indicated to be in change in spoken Finnish, and the survey results can then be compared to these earlier studies (e.g., Nuolijärvi & Sorjonen 2005; Mustanoja 2011; Kuparinen et al. 2021).

The analysis is based on both large-scale analyses and more focused inquiries. In the large-scale analyses, we compare groups based on the background variables (such as location or native language) and see how these variables are connected to the self-reporting of linguistic variables. More focused approaches look, for instance, at single linguistic features and their reported usage across the country.

According to the self-report data, many variables have spread widely among the young speakers of Finnish. For instance, vowel pairs iA and UA (karkkia ‘candy-PT’, hajua ‘smell-PT’) are to some extent reported to be monophthongized across the country, while in earlier dialect studies their usage was focused on the South-East and coast around Helsinki. Nonetheless, for many features the geographical distribution of the self-reporting corresponds well to earlier studies.