Welcome!

‘Deal in words?’

I am a linguist/technical writer; linguist by training, technical writer by profession (or at least that’s how I’ve earned most of my money since 2002). And after all, words are what these two fields are all about... The same is true for some of my hobbies (to wit, reading & writing, typography, and all aspects of language & languages) and even my plain everyday life. You see, I’m a bilingual speaker of German & English and I live in an environment that’s officially bilingual in two other languages (Finnish & Swedish); therefore, it’s not out of the ordinary for me to use up to four different languages on the same day...

Yes, I realize that that’s quite unusual. I’m originally from Germany, as already mentioned, but I’ve been living in Finland since 1994. Specifically: I was born in Saarbrücken in southwestern Germany, which is also where I grew up. Since 1994, I’ve been living in Vantaa, except for that one year I spent in nearby Espoo. Of course, I’m fluent in German because I grew up in Germany, and my knowledge of Finnish & Swedish comes from all those years in Finland – or rather, in the southern coastal region, where most of the population consists of Finnish native speakers but where there’s also a sizeable Swedish-speaking minority. As for my English, that’s the really unusual part: I didn’t know any English at all until I was 14, but since then, I’ve managed to not just pick up the language, but even achieve near-native competence.

You’ll find out more about me, my life, and my hobbies from the material I’ve published here:

Some shortcuts: who I am, how to pronounce my name correctly, the languages I know, the fields I’ve worked in, a few words on language construction, an explanation of the site banner, source & licencing information for text & graphics on this site (licencing information for the things I created, source information for those I didn’t).

I also have a private profile at wer-kennt-wen. It’s in German, though, and you need to log in in order to view it. (Not because I want to keep it secret, but because that’s how that particular social network works; only people who have an account there are allowed to look inside.)