Orð og tunga - 01.06.2014, Page 89

Vanessa Isenmann: Computer-mediated communication
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Interjections (jæja, æj, jííííhaaaaaaaaa, vá) are a frequent phenomenon
in the corpus as are English words and phrases10, both with English
spelling (oh my god, awesome) and adapted to Icelandic orthography
and/or grammar (likeinu, næs, ströggla).
Unadapted English borrowings include English single words and
phrases that are not adapted according to Icelandic phoneme-graph-
eme correspondence but are rather used with English orthography
(boys are back in town, awesome). Unadapted English borrowings in-
clude all terms that follow this pattern even if their form coincides
with Icelandic orthography. The most frequent unadapted English
borrowing is kids and its derivation kiddos with a total number of in-
cidences of 13. The word was always used to address the audience
either in the expression hey kids (5) or as a single word (6).
(5) A: Hey kids. Það er hádegisfæðsla í Halastjörnunni
núna á föstudaginn frá kl 11.30. Frír matur og mega
fjör. (...)
B: YEEES * 11
(6) A: hvað er planið kids?? Er þetta off eða?12
Mega is the second most common English word in the corpus and ac-
counts for 11 tokens. It is used both as an adjective (5) and an adverb
(7).
(7) A: Takk fyrir mega næs fund krakkar (...)13
It can be observed that phrases (boys are back in town, oh my god) are al-
ways unadapted (cf. (1), relevant part repeated as (8)). In the category
of unadapted English borrowings, 19 out of 91 tokens are phrases. How-
ever, the category of adapted English borrowings contains no phrases. It
is likely that phrases often function as citations and therefore they are
not adapted to Icelandic orthography.
10 With regard to phrases a distinction between borrozving and code switching could
be made but is of no further use for the purposes of this paper. Hence, both single
words and phrases are called borrowings in this paper. Furthermore, there is dis-
sension in linguistics about how to define and differentiate the terms borrowing
and codc szoitching. For further reading about the distinction of borrowing and code
switching see Thomason 2001 and Winford 2001.
11 In (5), A announces a free lunch.
12 In (6), A asks what the plan is and whether a plan was cancelled.
13 In (7), A thanks for a meeting.