Finland, a land of semiotics

The Semiotic Society of Finland was founded at the end of the 1970s, when similar groups were starting in other countries. From a tiny beginning it has grown into one of the largest national societies of semiotics in the world. Today, the society hosts several annual symposia and publishes the quarterly Synteesi for research in the interrelationships of arts. Semiotics is now taught all over the country, and a network of these academic institutions is taking place. The most recent (since 1995) is the study program of Semiotics in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki, which particularly welcomes foreign students interested in all areas of the discipline. Together with the courses given by the International Semiotics Institute (ISI), and boasting a vast semiotic library, the University of Helsinki makes the ideal place for Ph.D. studies in the field.

Finland has its own tradition of semiotics, starting with the school of folklore studies initiated by the brothers Krohn at the end of the nineteenth century. They founded a method of classifying folk tales and songs which was later adopted by Vladimir Propp. Their Methods also influenced research in narratology, story-telling, and folk music, such as that done by Béla Bartók and Zoltan Kodaly. The first true semiotician in the country was perhaps the Finnish-Swedish poet Henry Parland (1908-1930), who was a kind of proto-Roland Barthes.

Nowadays Finland is home to all manner of classical and poststructuralist semiotics, from Greimassians and Peirceans to deconstructionists and Lacanians. Vigorous and growing new branches of semiotics include medical research, musicology, Peirce studies, social semiotics, visual signs, management and advertising, gender studies, cognitive sciences, and many applied areas of the humanities.