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, and educational contexts often require specific address stance to maintain politeness and decorum, while private conversations may favour more intimate forms. Variation in osoitekantaa occurs across speakers, regions, age groups, and social networks, and can reflect identity, power relations, or group belonging. In multilingual or language-contact settings, additional dimensions such as code-switching and cross-cultural politeness norms influence the stance.

Researchers study osoitekantaa through discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and politeness theory, often using speech corpora, interviews, or ethnographic observation. The term highlights how small linguistic choices in addressing others carry social meaning beyond their literal reference.