|
Wednesday, 07 February 2007 |
|
The American dating culture and the way people talk about it is foreign to Finnish women, says Saila Poutiainen, a lecturer from the Department of Speech Sciences.
Poutiainen has compared the ways of North American and Finnish women talk about starting a romantic relationship. She focuses on the concept of dating.
'Dating is a sequence of events Finns are familiar with from American films and television series. Typically, a man asks a woman out, picks her up at her house, they go and have dinner at a restaurant and talk. Then he takes her home, and once on the doorstep they negotiate what form the farewell should take,' Poutiainen explains.
Poutiainen interviewed American and Finnish women in their thirties. She noticed that young educated American women talked about dating using work metaphors: it was about making active choices, calculating risks and assessing the return on the time invested.
The vocabulary Finnish women used when talking about a potentially romantic relationship included such terms as 'watching', 'seeing a bit of someone' or 'running across someone'.
'Instead of deliberate activity, these terms refer to things happening rather than making them happen, being in a certain space, coincidence, vagueness and certain lightness.'
By 'watching' the interviewees could mean anything lasting from weeks or months to just one journey on the Metro. It could mean either 'eyeing someone' or 'looking for someone ', keeping one's eyes open.
Poutiainen intends to continue studying the concepts Finnish women used to reach a deeper understanding of the values and beliefs related to romantic relationships and communication that lie behind them. She thinks that it is symptomatic of the cultural differences between North America and Finland that the English language does not have a one-word expression for 'going steady with someone' as Finnish does, while Finnish has no word for dating, and has borrowed the English word directly into colloquial speech.
Saila Poutiainen presented her study in the anniversary seminar of the Department of Speech Sciences on 17 November, which was held to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the first professorship in phonetics at the University of Helsinki.
Text: Liisa Voutilainen
Photo: MTV3/archive
www.helsinki.fi/digitalcommunications
Translation: Valtasana Oy
http://www.helsinki.fi/research/news/2004/week48.htm
Views: 1025
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.2 |
Home 
Be first to comment this article