Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Page 160

informants are women and four are men. Considering the differences you
described in the background chapter — that the younger generations are much
more likely to use borrowings and are more positive toward English influence —
I have the following question:
Do you think that age and gender are important in the context of the quanti-
tative analysis? Did you consider comparing the genders or focusing on a par-
ticular age group?

Vanessa Isenmann:
I did not consider comparing the genders. First of all, I had a lot more
women participating in the study than men. Also, I wanted to draw a more
general picture of different users’ digital practices. Finally, I only found 28
users to participate in the study. Restricting that group by gender or age
would have limited my data corpus. As for the age of the participants, my
informants were in their mid-20s up to their mid-60s when I started the
study. At the time, this seemed like a more or less representative sample. I
deliberately only allowed participants to the study who were older than 18
for reasons of consent. I simply did not want to have to obtain consent from
parents regarding their children. However, this decision excluded genera-
tion Z, that is people born between 1997 and 2012, from my research. But
then, for the language use of this particular generation, or even younger
speakers, we probably would have to turn to other sites such as TikTok.
Nevertheless, researching their digital practices could be an interesting pro-
ject for future research.

I have a follow-up question about the informants. In the qualitative analysis you
focus on twelve informants that are introduced with a profile that gives informa-
tion for example about the places where they have lived and studied and how
they use social media. According to their profiles, at least five of them have a
strong connection with Germany, in that they live or have lived in Germany, or
visit the country frequently. As a comparison, only two of the informants men-
tioned have spent some time in an English-speaking country.
Do other informants that are not profiled in the thesis also have a strong con-
nection with Germany and how does this affect the quantitative analysis?

Vanessa Isenmann:
It is true that there are many informants in my corpus that have ties to
Germany or the German language. This is due to the fact that many of my
informants were already part of my personal Facebook network and they
were former students of German or had lived in Germany for a while. If I
had a Polish background, the research corpus would perhaps have been dif-
Helga Hilmisdóttir160