I have been a researcher and project coordinator of the Research Unit for Volgaic languages since 1999. Before that, I worked as an assistant of Finno-Ugric Languages at the University of Turku. My main subject during the studies in Turku was Finno-Ugric Languages, and the most important secondary subjects were General Linguistics and Finnish Language. Having done my PhD in Finno-Ugric Languages (1997), I became interested in Turkic languages. I earned a MA degree in the discipline of Altaistics from the University of Helsinki in 2010..

I have always been interested in rare and exceptional phenomena in the morphology and morphosyntax on languages. My dissertation (1997) was about an enigmatic variation in the order of morphemes in the declension of Mari. When studying the Turkic languages, I became fascinated with a type of Chuvash suffixes that was, in my opinion, not correctly understood in earlier research; I concluded that they were syntactic nominalizers (2011). Most of my other research themes also relate to the languages of the Volga–Kama region in Russia, for instance, the grammatical category of plural in Mari; the birth and development of minority literary languages; variation in the literary norms; the discussion in electronic media pertaining to the Mordvin languages from the viewpoint of discourse analysis. Producing and developing research materials and dictionaries for linguists has been an important part of my work. I have organized collecting electronic text corpora, compiling of reverse dictionaries and word lists, and have participated in writing bilingual dictionaries.

I have taught introductory courses of general linguistics and Finno-Ugric languages, methodology of diachronic linguistics, and the Chuvash language. I have also lectured on some specific linguistic themes I have been working on. Facilitating the use of electronic corpora by students has also been part of my duties.