I was born on the 25th of September, 1977, in Veendam, and spent my youth in Oude Pekela. When I finished school in Stadskanaal I went to study Finno-Ugric languages in Groningen. My foremost object of study was Finnish, but I also studied Hungarian, some Estonian, Mordvin and some other languages. All in all, I studied five years, of which I spent two years (1997-1998 and 1999-2000) as an exchange student in Turku, Finland.
After my studies I tried to become a Ph. D. student in Groningen, but this turned out not to be so easy. In the summer of 2001 I got a job for a year as teacher of Dutch in Tbilisi, Georgia. I stayed in Tbilisi from September 2001 to June 2002. After that I decided to return to Finland, where I worked as a teacher of Dutch as well and worked on my research proposal at the same time.
In the spring I heard I received a position as Ph.D. Student in Stockholm at the Finnish Institute, and I moved there in September.
My research project deals with the influence that Swedish has exerted in Finnish - and particularly Finnish syntax and morphology, in the 16th and 17th century. My corpus consists of Finnish legal texts which were translated from the Swedish in the 17th century, when Finland was part of the Swedish kingdom. What do I wish to prove with my research? First, our knowledge about how languages influence each other particularly in the area of syntax is not terribly good, and I hope my research may contribute to that knowledge. Second, the influence of Swedish on Finnish itself has not been researched thoroughly yet, and I hope that my research may provide some beginning towards that as well.
I am a communist with a very strong libertarian streak. I don't think the party for me exists at the moment, and I am not terribly active in politics at this time.
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