Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Qupperneq 145

vanessa monika isenmann
Presentation of the thesis

When I first started this Ph.D. project, social media and especially Facebook
played an important role in my life. I was a German living abroad and I had
friends all over Europe. Facebook allowed me to stay in touch with everybody
and to show them what I was up to so far away from home. Also, coming to
Iceland, I experienced Facebook to play an even bigger role in people’s everyday
lives since it is not only used for personal matters, but also in public and profes-
sional contexts. Therefore, studying communication on Facebook was some-
thing that felt relevant to me and it was something I could relate to.
What made Icelandic especially interesting for me in this regard, are the
strong feelings Icelanders have toward their language and the status that the lan-
guage seems to enjoy in the society, at least from a German perspective. Here in
Iceland the language is seen as a cultural heritage and researchers have repeatedly
emphasized the rather conservative language ideal that seems to persist in the
Icelandic speech community and favors the “pure” language of Old Icelandic
sagas. At the same time, societal and technological changes have led to changing
linguistic practices in Iceland, a fact that is repeatedly addressed not only in the
academic but also in the public discourse. The perceived dominance of English in
digital media and on the internet has in particular fueled concerns that the status
of Icelandic may be endangered in this domain and that Icelandic could even be
at risk of becoming digitally extinct.
Against this backdrop, I became interested in the question of where Icelandic
is headed in the digital discourse. Therefore, my research project addresses
Icelandic writing practices in so-called computer-mediated communication or
CMC. More precisely, it focuses on the form and status of Icelandic on social
media, notably Facebook. Accordingly, the main objective of my project was to
investigate Icelandic linguistic practices on Facebook with due regard to persist-
ing ideas about a linguistically conservative and stable Icelandic speech commu-
nity.
First, I planned to analyze only Icelandic Facebook practices. But then I got
the chance to add a different perspective to my research as I joined the research
project Dulin viðhorf til íslenskra málbrigða, mat á málnotkun (Subconscious atti-
tudes to Icelandic language variation, evaluations of language use). The project
sought to study people’s language attitudes toward different aspects of the
Icelandic language. Working in the Dulin viðhorf project shifted the focus of my
Íslenskt mál 45 (2023), 145–179. © 2023 Íslenska málfræðifélagið, Reykjavík.