Language is a living entity

Welcome to our fifth guest blog post for the LAIF project, where we continue exploring questions of language, belonging, and inclusion in Finland through the experiences and scientific reflections of our contributors. This time, we are happy to introduce Berenice Rivera-Macias, a Senior RDI specialist at Laurea University of Applied Sciences, who reflects on multilingualism, language use, and everyday life in Finland from both personal and professional perspectives.

In this blog, Berenice writes about her own Finnish language journey, the role of language in creating connection and belonging, and the ways children and young people use languages creatively in their daily lives. Drawing from her experiences as a parent, researcher, and professional working with multilingualism and inclusion, she explores how languages are constantly shaped through social interaction. From Finglish to “YouTube English,” the blog highlights the fluid and evolving ways people communicate and connect in contemporary Finland.

Thank you, Berenice, for contributing to the LAIF project!

Berenice Rivera-Macias | Photo credit: Sini Uusikartano-Rivera

Intro

In collaboration with the LAIF project, it is a great opportunity to share some of my experiences and observations about one relevant side of my life in Finland: language(s) and their use. The other blog entries so far show others’ experiences of language in Finland and impact the conversations on such important topics. It is very close to my heart to discuss ways in which we can contribute to the understanding of language vis-à-vis social equality, participation, and inclusion. Yet, most importantly, how language fosters a sense of belonging to the local society. Personally, it is relevant from the perspective of a forever Finnish language learner who has a multilingual family. Professionally, it is at the core of what I do as a senior RDI specialist in the Diversity and Multilingualism Research group in Laurea University of Applied Sciences (Laurea UAS, n.d.-a). My objective is to convey a fluid perspective on language as something that is alive in all of us through our social interactions in our desire to connect with one another in a new country. The main examples that I use to illustrate that perspective come from children and young people.

Throughout everyday life and work experiences, I have confirmed that, indeed, language is about syntax and semantics, phonetics, phonology, prosody, as much as about emotions, neurodiversities, cultural practices, and the interconnectedness of social phenomena. In this blog entry, I apply reflexivity to my experiences from the realms of the personal and the professional, which, for me, are never separated in everyday encounters. My particular focus is how Finnish language is currently used by children and young people to connect with each other, which I present departing from my language journey. Underpinning this exploration is the view on practical lived ideologies of the social dimensions of language used offered by Mai Shirahata, Malgorzata Lahti & Marko Siitonen (2025) as something that gets built over time by the way a person consistently chooses their words when talking with others.

Perspectives from my Finnish language journey

I have lived in Finland for almost fourteen years, and Finnish language has been challenging to learn to the extent that I would feel confident using it to express myself professionally. The conceptualisation of what is enough Finnish language for any given interaction, being social or professional, has been studied and questioned (i.e. Intke-Hernandez, 2022; Hokkanen, Vuori, & Leminen, 2023). In my experience, the resulting personal stress has been decreasing due to plurilingual practices facilitating not only communication and understanding, but meaningful connections in the workplace (Rivera-Macias & Leminen, forthcoming).

But coming back to my journey, I started learning the language, about its nuances, and complexities of its practice, e.g., the differences between the written and the spoken language, along with dialects. I was aware of the latter a long time before I moved here, because of many prior encounters with Finnish people here and abroad. For example, in the UK, I met Finns who expressed pride in their dialects and had fun highlighting the regional differences amongst each other. During my initial years in Finland, I took language courses in my free time, alongside my duties as a full-time mum. Thus, free time was a bit of a challenge in itself, and my priorities were elsewhere than achieving Finnish proficiency. Deciding to raise my children, so they could also learn about me and my two strong languages, namely Spanish and English, was very important to me and our family. The Finnish language courses helped me get by and start to develop my social networks. Eventually, they also gave me tools to build confidence in using Finnish in everyday tasks and provided me with the foundations for learning more through social and professional interactions.

At many times, when immersed in everyday life and on top of that experiencing Finnish, it felt like being lost in a labyrinth. Photo taken by the author. 

Everyday social life reshapes languages

In practice, plurilingualism became part of my family’s everyday life in a very conscious manner. For instance, it was a privilege to find certain hobbies in Spanish for my children, and social clubs for adults and children in that language too. Additionally, we participated in the Kolibrí Festivaali (Kolibrí, 2026) when my children were small. The festival is a multicultural and multilingual event where families can do crafts, enjoy performances, and story telling. The availability of diverse cultural festivals and community-based services in Finland exists thanks to the superdiversity in the Helsinki metropolitan area (Martikainen & Pöyhönen, 2023). From early on, I noticed how children participating in those clubs and events were using languages in such a way that we adults could only admire: without fear of judgement. For example, children’s ages and backgrounds were diverse, although they were small and that probably helped them not to be scared of communicating with and without words, being in the correct grammatical use or not. The natural organic way in which I observed that children deployed their language repertoires was fluid. Their purpose was always to understand and to be understood, but most importantly, to develop connections with others. And this is the most significant role of language that I want to put forward in this writing piece.

As years went by and I learned more Finnish, I noticed, mostly in adults, how people mixed the use of Finnish and English and the adaptation of English terms becoming Finnishised, the well-known Finglish. Moreover, in public spaces, I heard Swedish-speaking teenagers mixing Swedish and English, which initially surprised me, as I was not yet familiar with Finnish youth culture. Although I perceived that language use here was rather flexible, I soon realised that this is not exactly the case. This is because in Finland there is an ongoing conflict with the experience of languages vis-à-vis national language ideologies, attitudes and policies. Language ideologies can be understood as dynamic positionings of people and their beliefs, feelings and understandings about language(s) and communication as they are produced at the individual level and in interaction with social structures and any other form of expression locally and globally (Green-Eneix & Kroskrity, 2025). One of the conflicts I refer to originates from the use of English, as researched by the LAIF project, addressed in studies in Finland from various perspectives. For example, Shirahata, Lahti, & Siitonen (2025) examine students’ language use in the higher education setting, and Toivanen & Saarikivi (2016) critically explore new patterns of plurilingual superdiversity in contrast to minority language decline. I will go into more detail about what the second source refers to in the next paragraphs.

As my children got older, I observed that they and their friends spoke in a different manner than that of the Finnish adults, and that has carried on in an evolving manner. Nowadays, my children are teenagers, and they mostly speak a new version of Finglish that goes beyond common everyday speech and has been explored by Niemi and Eloranta (2025). While interacting with my children, I initially thought that it was an influence from their upbringing, but the influence was more from social media and video gaming presence in our everyday lives. Readers may be familiar with how teenagers use old and new English concepts differently from their original meaning, and how language trends come and go rather strongly and fast. English terms are used interchangeably with Finnish as its usage evolves. Even outside Finland, parents from around the world have reported this situation in social media posts, imitating their children and trying to keep up with the fast-changing use of language among the new generations (see Cantor, 2025; Collins, 2024; Holderness Family Laughs, 2022). That is a way of using a sense of humour to deal with the complexities that we adults cannot fully understand and need to adapt rapidly, should we feel the need for connection with the new generations.

Children and young people are not afraid of taking different paths in their experience of language, and many adults are also adventurous, but not all of us. Photo taken by the author.

Furthermore, a different phenomenon is present in smaller children’s language use. In our current ESF co-funded project about multilingualism in early years education, VOIKO (Laurea UAS, n.d.-b), we have observed, and educators have highlighted too, that children who do not have English as their home language use YouTube English. This takes place in daycare centres with groups of children from superdiverse international and Finnish backgrounds. In our research team, we have come across the expression "YouTube English", which, to put it simply, refers to the learning and use of small phrases and words of the English language learned through YouTube video watching. The learning is not explicitly purposeful, as it happens by watching YouTube videos. The spontaneous use has the purpose of connecting with others, since other children may understand or relate to the used words. YouTube English is a term widely referred to by parents of small children, educators, and some of us researchers. So far, I have not found research done on this specific perspective on the topic. Therefore, based on our project data from daycare centres observations, I offer the following initial analysis in efforts towards the definition that I wrote above.

During the spring and autumn of 2025, the VOIKO project team observed various daycare centres in Helsinki and Vantaa, focusing on their multilingualism practices. Nonetheless, during the observations, we also noticed children’s use of the English language learned from online video watching and video games playing. Additionally, daycare centres’ staff expressed that although parents may see the potential in helping their children learn English, those videos are not explicitly produced for language learning. In practice, this results in children using very short English phrases such as ‘well done!’, to connect with other children in their social interactions. Nonetheless, when asked back in English, they cannot elaborate on the language further. As a matter of speculation, these children may use YouTube English as a connecting tool with their peers, particularly between native and non-native Finnish speakers when there is not yet a shared common language. In that sense, the few YouTube English phrases also facilitate a certain level of understanding in children’s intergroup relations. By viewing the current early years education environment in Finland as a mini-superdiverse society sample (Lavanti, 2025), one can develop imagination and understanding of what our society is to come, where children set the example for ways to create a sense of belonging.

Closing reflections

Planning and writing this text was a great opportunity for me to combine the personal with the professional, with the aim of showcasing another perspective on language experiences in Finland. I hope that I have managed to transmit that languages are alive with the people who use them. Since people move places, bringing with themselves their own diversities, when we encounter others in the social realm, everything is possible. We can learn from each other, and we seek forms of connection. When connections are meaningful, a sense of belonging to a place and to a society in particular can start to develop. Thus, fostering opportunities to communicate regardless of the language(s) used and the way they flow in practice is something I have learned from my personal experience as well as from observations during project work. All of that does not mean that learning languages and valuing them is dismissed as irrelevant, on the contrary. In my own experience and research, I have noted that through that sense of connection and belonging, one also feels motivated to learn and understand the local language better, too, and also become proud of using it. It kind of becomes a quid pro quo situation for some of us.

If we take some distance and see the whole picture, we can also notice that there are different paths within the complexities of language experience and try them out. No one is alone in this journey, even if each experience is individual. Photo taken by Sini Uusikartano-Rivera.

About the author Berenice works as a Senior RDI specialist at Laurea University of Applied Sciences, in projects concerning social integration in Finland and functional language learning. She is also a freelance positive education trainer for See the Good!

Like most international people, Berenice has lived many lives, trying to follow her professional interests and her heart. Her current roles are influenced by her background in psychology and sociology. Life took her to Finland almost fourteen years ago, where she raised her children in her evolving multicultural style. She restarted her professional life four years ago, always wondering about the actual role(s) and practicalities of the Finnish language in work life and in social life in general, in relation to social phenomena and structures, and individual agency, such as those explored here. She works and is interested in projects around such topics, too. 

Berenice, Photo taken by Sini Uusikartano-Rivera

References Cantor, Matthew (2025, October 30). Slang terms like ‘six-seven’ have no definition. But they’re loaded with meaning. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/30/six-seven-meaning-slang?CMP=share_btn_url 

Collins, Alyce (2024, June 2). Millennial Dad Horrifies Gen Z Kids by Using Their Slang: ‘Not Impressed’. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/millennial-dad-horrifies-kids-using-slang-1906756 

Green-Eneix, C., & Kroskrity, P. V. (2025). Diversifying the Concept of Language Ideologies, and Exploring their Assemblages: A Dialogue with Paul V. Kroskrity. Journal of Education, Language, and Ideology, 3(1), 171–190. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16932906 

Hokkanen, S., Vuori, J. & Leminen, A-K (2023). Riittävästä kielitaidosta kulttuurin ja institutionaalisen tilanteen haasteisiin asioimistulkkauksessa. In Martikainen, T., & Pöyhönen, S. (Eds.). Superdiversiteetti: Näkökulmia maahanmuuton monimuotoisuuteen. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran toimituksia, 1489. https://doi.org/10.21435/skst.1489

Intke-Hernandez, M. (2022). Mikä on riittävän hyvää suomea? Kielikello. https://kielikello.fi/mik%c3%a4-on-riitt%c3%a4v%c3%a4n-hyv%c3%a4%c3%a4-suomea/

Kolibrí (2026). Kolibrí Festivaali. https://www.kolibrifestivaali.org/

Laurea UAS (n.d.-a). Diversity and Multilingualism Research Group. https://www.laurea.fi/en/research/diversity-and-multilingualism-research-group/

Laurea UAS (n.d.-b). Voimavarais­tava ja inklusi­ivi­nen kielen oppiminen. https://www.laurea.fi/en/projects/v/voimavaraistava-ja-inklusiivinen-kielen-oppiminen/

Lavanti, L. (2025). Superdiverse Miniature Society: Supporting Socially Sustainable Wellbeing of Families with an Immigrant Background in Finnish Early Childhood Education. [Dissertation] Faculty of Education Sciences, University of Helsinki.

Martikainen, T., & Pöyhönen, S. (Eds.). (2023). Superdiversiteetti: Näkökulmia maahanmuuton monimuotoisuuteen. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran toimituksia, 1489. https://doi.org/10.21435/skst.1489

Niemi, L. & Eloranta, V. (2025). Finglish — Miksi englanti ärsyttää? Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura Kirjat.

Holderness Family Laughs. (2022, July 13). Trying to talk like GenZ [Video] YouTube. https://youtu.be/RV_aXTD7vfQ?si=OGwV-_S_ojoVgtE6 

Rivera-Macias, B. & Leminen, A. (2026). The Shift from Multilingual to Plurilingual Ethos: Research Practices in Development Projects. Forthcoming. In Thinking, Practising and Living Plurilingualism. Masaryk University Press.

Shirahata, M., Lahti, M. & Siitonen, M. (2025). Language ideologies in a Finnish university student union’s Facebook communication practices, Social Semiotics, 35:1, 114-132, DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2023.2267462

Toivanen, R., & Saarikivi, J. (Eds.) (2016). Linguistic Genocide or Superdiversity? New and Old Language Diversities. (Linguistic Diversity and Language Rights: 14). Multilingual matters.