Municipalities in Finland should use English instead of Finnish on social media if they wish to garner the most attention for their posts.
That's according to the preliminary findings of a linguistics PhD thesis by Rachel Albicker, currently in progress at the University of Eastern Finland.
Albicker's study looked into the communication and language used by 164 Finnish municipalities on social media platform Twitter, now known as X, and found that posts in English received the most visibility, reactions and retweets.
In total, the data analysed hundreds of thousands of social media posts from 2009 to 2023, including all tweets sent by the municipalities during those years.
Of that number, 92 percent of the content was in Finnish, 4 percent in Swedish, and 2 percent in English. Some 56 of the 164 municipalities in the study had never once tweeted in English, while three in Åland never posted in Finnish.
The study found that English is mostly used around the capital region, in Helsinki and in the wider Uusimaa region, with Finnish accounting for 85 percent of posts, while English made up 4 percent.
After Uusimaa, English was used most in South Karelia (3.6 percent), Ostrobothnia (2.7 percent) and Pirkanmaa (2.2 percent).
The thesis is part of a project entitled English in coexistence with the national languages of Finland, funded by the government's analysis, assessment and research activities and led by Professor of English Language and Culture Mikko Laitinen.
"The status of English and its use in Finland, and its impact on the Finnish language, in particular, have been ongoing topics in the country’s language policy debate," the project's website notes, adding that "research on English language use and its impact is needed to develop common language policies for English."
The results will be included in the project's final report, due later this year.
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