osoitekantaa
Osoitekantaa is a concept used in Finnish sociolinguistics to describe how a speaker positions themselves toward an interlocutor through the choice of address forms and related linguistic resources. The core idea is that who is being addressed, and how they are addressed, communicates social relations such as formality, respect, familiarity, distance, and hierarchy. Osoitekantaa is realized in practices such as pronoun use (for example choosing between formal and informal second-person forms in Finnish), titles and forms of address, nicknames, diminutives, and direct or indirect address strategies. It also encompasses pragmatic tones, including politeness, assertiveness, or friendliness, depending on context.
In practice, the concept helps analyze everyday interaction as well as institutional settings. Service encounters, workplaces,
Researchers study osoitekantaa through discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and politeness theory, often using speech corpora, interviews,