June 30th, 2020:
The final report of the project was submitted to the IRF today, four years after the project started and one year after it officially ended. The main text of the report can be found under Progress and an Icelandic summary under Íslenska.
June 30th, 2019:
Today is the official closing day of the project, which startedhttps://molicodilaco.hi.is/islenska/ exactly three years ago, on July 1st, 2016. The in-depth interviews are finished – we have interviewed around 260 people of all ages. Two Master’s theses and two BA theses have been written within the project this year. The large online survey has been delayed but it will be conducted in the course of the next few months. Even though the project has officially ended, we will of course continue processing and analyzing the data we have collected, giving talks and writing papers. A final project meeting is planned in August.
January 29th, 2019:
A progress report for 2018 has been put on the project web site, under Progress.
January 27th, 2019:
Last summer, Professor Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir was contacted by a 17 year old American college student from Atlanta, Wyatt Woodbery, who had come across the MoLiCoDiLaCo web site and become very interested in the project. He asked whether it would be possible to work on a school related research project within MoLiCoDiLaCo. Sigríður said yes, and Wyatt came to Iceland at the end of December and stayed for three weeks. During his stay, he designed a scale, in cooperation with Sigríður, to grade the English proficiency of participants 13 years and older in the English language samples collected in the interviews (accent, vocabulary, grammar, syntactic comlexity, and hesitation during speech). Furthermore, he listened to all the 130 recordings of interviews with adults that have been made already and graded them. We were extremely pleased with his visit and the project benefited greatly from it. The newspaper Morgunblaðið published a news item on this story.
July 5th, 2018:
The interviews are proceeding well. More than 100 interviews (2 x 2 hours) have now been completed. The student assistants have been conducting day trips to the south and west and longer trips to the north.
May 18th, 2018:
Our student assistants have now finished their exams and started working full time on the project. Their main task during the summer will be to conduct in-depth interviews.
May 3rd, 2018:
Four Master’s theses written within the project will be delivered this month.
April 13th, 2018:
The MoLiCoDiLaCo project will arrange a conference with a number of invited speakers in Reykjavík on August 28th-29th, 2018. Details to follow.
March 21st, 2018:
Three project participants, Dagbjört Guðmundsdóttir, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson and Iris Edda Nowenstein, are now in Philadelphia participating in the 42nd Penn Linguistics Conference. On Saturday, Dagbjört and Iris will give a talk on “Retroproductive case and frequency effects“, co-authored with Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir. This talk is in part based on preliminary data from MoLiCoDiLaCo.
March 15th, 2018:
The in-depth interviews are now in full swing, and will continue for the next months. They are very time consuming, since each of the 400 subjects will be interviewed twice, for two hours each time. In order to speed up the process, we have hired a number of undergraduate students who have now been trained in taking interviews and have started interviewing subjects on their own.
March 5th, 2018:
The MoLiCoDiLaCo project will arrange a special colloquium on Digital language contact in ELL at the Early Language Learning Conference to be held in Reykjavík on June 13th-15th, 2018. The project will also arrange a workshop at the Nordic Dialect Conference to be held in Reykjavík on August 20th-22nd, 2018.
March 4th, 2018:
1622 teenagers and adults, age 13-98, have responded to our online survey and around 550 children, age 3-12, have responded so far. The survey for the children is still open. We have already started the in-depth interviews with the adult participants.