• language change
• sociolinguistics
• linguistic complexity and information theory
• evolutionary game theory

I currently work as postdoc in the SNSF-funded WWW-SArDEEn project, led by Prof Eva Zehentner. What took me here has been a winding path: after undergraduate studies in Helsinki (Cognitive Science, English Philology, Mathematics, Philosophy and Latin), I obtained my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Manchester in 2018, under the supervision of David Denison, George Walkden, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero and Tobias Galla. Since then, I have worked in various postdoctoral roles at Manchester and at the University of Konstanz.

My current research falls into two main categories. First, I employ the techniques of evolutionary dynamics and evolutionary game theory to propose mathematical models of linguistic variation and language change, and evaluate these models against empirical data. Secondly, I work with time series models to try and squeeze out as much information from historical corpora as possible, with the ultimate aim of singling out factors causally responsible for language change.

The following list provides a few representative publications (for a full listing, consult my personal website [https://hkauhanen.fi]):

Kauhanen, H. (2026) Propagation of change: computational models. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Diachronic and Historical Linguistics (eds A. Ledgeway, M. Everaert, H. van Riemsdijk, E. Aldridge, A. Breitbarth, K. Kiss, J. Salmons & A. Simonenko). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119898023.wbcdl030 (free preprint available at https://hkauhanen.fi/papers/propagation.pdf)

Kauhanen, H. (2025) Conditions for global asymptotic dominance in multidimensional grammar competition. In Proceedings of the 18th Meeting on the Mathematics of Language (eds. T. Graf, M. Hayden, J. Heinz, L. Moss & Y. Wang), 114–125. Stony Brook, NY: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2025.mol-1.9/

Kauhanen, H. (2022) A bifurcation threshold for contact-induced language change. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 7(1), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.8211

Kauhanen, H. (2020) Replicator–mutator dynamics of linguistic convergence and divergence. Royal Society Open Science, 7, 201682. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201682

In autumn semester 2026, I am excited to be teaching the graduate seminar “Evolutionary games and cultural evolution”.

I am interested in supervising BA and MA theses which incorporate some notion of language change or sociolinguistic variation, particularly if they adopt a quantitative or formal approach. Please get in touch if you’re interested in pursuing such a topic!

Personal website [https://hkauhanen.fi]