Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Page 176

Vanessa Isenmann:
It is true that it can be challenging to blend quantitative and qualitative
research methods. For me, for example, the quantitative analysis was quite
challenging because I had not worked with statistical analyses before. There-
fore, it took me a while to figure out the correct and best way to do that.
However, from the quantitative analysis alone, I would not have re ceived
the same insight into the users’ linguistic practices that I got from the qual-
itative analysis. Without the qualitative analysis, I may have concluded that
English is in fact very prominent in the data set and that it could indeed
threaten the status of Icelandic in digital communication. Here, I needed
the qualitative analysis to understand the ways and reasons to employ
English as a resource. In contrast to that, from the qualitative analysis
alone one might get the impression that German is quite an important
resource in the data set. Here we need the quantitative analysis to put the
actual numbers right and show, that even though some informants do draw
on German as a resource, it is negligible in the overall context of the
research corpus. Therefore, I would argue that the strengths outweigh the
challenges.
Regarding your second question, I guess one could have integrated the
quantitative study and the attitudes study a bit more in the qualitative analy-
sis. However, from the top of my head I cannot tell you how and I think the
connections I drew between the three studies are still valuable results.

3.5 Social media and sociolinguistic change in Iceland — future challenges and
possibilities
In the final section, I aim to make Vanessa reflect a bit on the influence of social
media on processes of sociolinguistic change in Iceland. Based on the knowledge
we get from Vanessa’s dissertation about language use on Facebook I want her
to elaborate on the following question:
How does social media (in particular Facebook) affect or influence the
Icelandic language in general (that is, on the level of practice and language
ideology) and the participants’ everyday sociolinguistic reality?

Vanessa Isenmann:
Social practices change and with those changing social practices, linguistic
practices change as well. In the case of Iceland, I find it important to empha-
size that the Icelandic understanding of what the written norm entails seems
to change. While written Icelandic was formerly often associated with tra-
ditional, standardized forms that are oriented toward the proclaimed lin-
guistic purity, we now find an awareness of different genres of writing
Andreas Candefors Stæhr176