Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Síða 163

In the quantitative analysis of your thesis, there is not much discussion about the
problems that came up when you were categorizing the posts. I am sure that cat-
egorizing every lexical item in the data as Icelandic or not Icelandic cannot have
been an easy task. There are many gray areas and cases of doubt. The only exam-
ple you discuss is the noun Berlínardvöl, and you claim that the word Berlín could
potentially be interpreted as German. However, in my opinion, this is not really
a difficult case because there is no alternative way of referring to the city in
Icelandic.
In my mind, there are other cases that I would have liked to see discussed.
For example, words that are used very frequently in informal situations and
advertisements on webpages, bus stops, and television.
The adjective næs, for example, was used in a slogan by the Red Cross not so
long ago, Vertu næs ‘Be nice’. The word has become widely used in informal con-
texts. We also see the word pizza spelled with a z in newspapers and on menus.
But does that necessarily mean that native speakers of Icelandic associate these
features with other languages? Do young language users associate the noun pizza
with Italian?
This leads me to Table 9 of the dissertation (p. 78), according to which you
identify nine different languages in the data. In your discussion, however, you do
not show any examples of these features, and you do not describe what type of
words or phrases they represent. I am mainly thinking about the “smaller” lan-
guages, such as Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, and Latin.
Could you give examples of the types of features from the other languages
that occur in the data? Is there some kind of a pattern, and can we be sure that
the informants themselves associate these features with the respective lan-
guages? Or have these words simply become a part of the Icelandic vocabu-
lary?

Vanessa Isenmann:
First of all, I argue that the informants are aware of the associations that cer-
tain features elicit with the “smaller” languages. The features ascribed to
Finnish, for example, refer to names. All of them are used in one contribu-
tion and the user is aware of the fact that these names are Finnish, because
he talks about that in his post. As for Latin, the features in question are
quotes such as “Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant”. Other than that, two users
play with features they associate with Latin or the Roman Empire. The user
Tristan for example Latinizes his name in a post. In the post, he shares a pic-
ture of himself dressed up as what he describes to be a citizen of ancient
Rome, perhaps for a costume party or something similar. In the caption,
Tristan Latinizes his name and writes “Tristanius Maximus, the emperor of
Rome.”
Comments and discussion points from the first opponent 163