Olga Nenonen

Olga Nenonen is a University Lecturer at Tampere University's Department of Language Studies within the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences. Her work focuses on Russian language and culture, with particular emphasis on bilingualism, heritage language maintenance, and language acquisition in multilingual contexts.

She holds a PhD from Tampere University (2016), with her dissertation exploring the phonetic development of Russian-Finnish bilingual preschool children. Her research spans 20+ years, with key contributions to understanding bilingual phonology, lexical acquisition patterns, and sociolinguistic aspects of language maintenance among heritage speakers in Finland.

Research interests include:

• Bilingualism and language contact phenomena
• Phonetics/phonology of heritage language speakers
• Language policy in transnational families
• Methodologies for teaching Russian as a heritage/minority language
• Child language development in multilingual environments

Her recent work (2024) examines accent patterns among heritage Russian speakers in Finland, family language policy in transnational contexts, and pedagogical approaches for bilingual learners. She has extensively published on error analysis in bilingual writing, cross-linguistic lexical tasks, and age-of-acquisition norms across languages.

Lingvocultural approaches to language teaching form a core part of her pedagogical research, integrating sociolinguistic perspectives into university-level instruction. Her work bridges theoretical linguistics with practical applications in multilingual education.