Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Qupperneq 146

Ph.D. thesis, as I became increasingly interested not only in what people do with
language online, but also what people think about language use online. As a result
of this, my thesis comprises a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Icelandic
Facebook practices as well as a study on people’s attitudes toward digital writing.
In this presentation, I would like to discuss the key results of my studies as
well as the conclusions that can be drawn from them. I will start by outlining rel-
evant directions in CMC research. After that, I will summarize the different
studies that comprise my project. Finally, I will discuss some limitations and con-
clusions.
I am primarily interested in digital communication. In the past two decades
scholars have studied different aspects of CMC, including, but not limited to, its
structures and features, characteristics of different communication forms and
genres, and the impact of CMC on language use and language change. My research
project is especially informed by so-called new literacy studies. New literacy
studies are concerned with reading and writing activities in online spaces and
view these activities as social practices. Beyond that, my project is influenced by
research on superdiversity and multilingualism and draws especially on the
notion of polylanguaging, which was coined by Norman J. Jørgensen (2008).
This notion starts from the idea that speakers make use of whatever formal fea-
tures are available to them to reach their communicative goals. Features in this
context refer to linguistic units on all linguistic levels including sounds, words,
phrases, etc. The notion of polylanguaging was especially useful for my project
as it moves the linguistic analysis beyond the level of individual languages. At the
same time, however, it acknowledges that we always make associations with fea-
tures. This means we link certain features with particular languages, values,
speakers, etc. Drawing on polylanguaging, I could include features in my analysis
that cannot be assigned to any given language including for example emojis,
interjections, expressive punctuation, etc. Beyond that, the project addresses ide-
ologies and CMC. On the one hand, research on ideologies which focuses on
how social and linguistic ideologies shape communication in online environ-
ments as well as how users discursively construct these ideologies. On the other
hand, such studies examine views and perceptions about digital practices. Into
this latter category falls, for example, the language attitudes study that I conduct-
ed in the course of the Dulin viðhorf project.
The Dulin viðhorf study was the first one I conducted and served as a refer-
ence point within this research project. It addressed two research questions:

1. What are speakers’ (subconscious) attitudes toward informal digital writ-
ing?
2. How do these evaluations and people’s actual digital practices relate to
language regard, linguistic ideology, and a possibly changing linguistic cli-
mate in Iceland?
Vanessa Monika Isenmann146