摘要：Australia has been one of the most important destinations for
Finnish emigrants outside of Sweden, North America and Canada. Yet,
apart from the scholarly work of Koivukangas (1972, 1975, 1986), and
Hentula (1990) little systematic attention has been paid to this ethnic
group within Australia’s shores. For instance, no published data seems
to be available on the spoken English of this group of emigrants. In
the Australian winter of 1994, I interviewed 135 Finnish Australians in
order to compile a corpus of their spoken English. The following paper
discusses previous corpus-based linguistic studies conducted in America
on the spoken English of Finnish ethnic communities (Hirvonen 1982,
1988, 1992, 1993; Hirvonen and Lauttamus 1994; Lauttamus and Hirvonen
1995; Pietilä 1989; Halmari 1993) before presenting a brief outline of
the Finnish community in Australia. It then offers a description of the
interview procedure employed during this project. Finally, I hypothesize
on expected results, relating these hypotheses to current models and
relatively recent scholarly work on the English of American Finns.
