On language and ‘outsideness’
Today is a ”shut up and write” day. Once or twice a month, my colleagues and I book a room and sit together in companionable quiet to write, drink coffee, and eat pulla. I practised this in the last stages of my PhD along with a good friend of mine. We would work in the British Library and break for motivational cups of tea at regular intervals.
It so happens that writing is not coming easily today. I am working on a research proposal for a continuation of my current project; this time, exploring how attachment to place changes over time, and whether the benefits gained from favourite places also change in line with this development in attachment. As part of this I want know what people think about new places that they discover, what they remember of these places, and what they think and feel if they revisit the place time and again. An obvious way to ask these questions would be in an interview setting, and I have done this kind of qualitative research before in the UK with insightful results.
Now that I am in Finland, though, I come up against a linguistic barrier. I speak enough Finnish to manage basic interactions but research requires much greater fluency than I could hope for. The level of English-language proficiency amongst Finns is generally very high, but asking research participants to speak to me, a native English speaker, in a language that is not their own highlights differences in culture and perceived positions of authority between us. This has obvious downsides: meaning may be lost in the act of using a non-native language to express concepts about places that are necessarily Finnish; and it places additional demand on participants. “I ask you to give of yourself in the form of your thoughts and memories, but since I cannot speak your language I also ask that you do so in a way that is easiest for me.”
On the other hand, I feel that there may also be a positive side to this difficulty when I consider my own stance in this research (who am I in the study and interpretation of people’s attachment to place?). I am interested in the development of bonds between people and place, and this is not purely an academic question. I moved to Finland around a year ago and I notice my own attachment to this country developing and changing. I notice also a shift in perception of my ‘old’ or ‘other’ home, too*.
In the context of this research I am not a scientist in a white coat standing on the edge of the action with a clipboard. I am learning about Finland, its people, and their relationship with the land. I cannot hide my difference and my comparative outsider status. A common strategy in cross-cultural research is to engage an interpreter during interviews, or a native-language researcher plus translator, but I wonder if in doing this I am trying to erase what is actually a strength: I am not a Finnish person, I do not know Finland well, and I bring my “outsideness” to every aspect of this research. Perhaps by offering myself to participants as the outsider, language barriers and all, I can give power and agency to my participants by asking them to teach me about places that matter to them.
I don’t have a clear answer yet as to how I will solve this linguistic problem, only that I will need to consider it, and find a solution that captures what people want to share with me as accurately as possible whilst also being affordable and practical. One idea that I am playing with is using non-verbal methods as well, including place journals that combine photography, videos, drawings, map-making, audio-recordings, and more. That is something I am looking forward to thinking about further next week.
*As an example of the linguistic challenges involved in studying this topic, I could not write that I am “homesick” for London because that word seems too dramatic for the way that I feel. I felt homesick in my first couple of months in Finland while I adjusted to living abroad for the first time. Now that feeling has mellowed. I feel a gentle longing for London, its physical form and the people there, and the changes that shape the city in my absence. I think now that I have two homes, and while homesickness was based on negative emotions (“Here is something I want that I do not have”), this feeling that is with me now is a love for a place where I am not, but will always be there for me to return to (“Here is something I can revisit”). There are so many ways to describe this feeling, each with their own distinct emotional and cultural flavour. Nostalgia (positive), saudade (melancholic), kaiho (I’m not even sure I understand the emotional tone of this Finnish variation but it sounds like a cross between nostalgia and sisu…)
