Progress | MOLICODILACO

Final report, 2020

Short summary, June 30th, 2020

The research project “Modeling the Linguistic Consequences of Digital Language Contact” received a Grant of Excellence from the IRF in 2016. The main goal of the project was to map and analyze the status of the Icelandic language in times of radical societal and technological changes, with special consideration to English influence, especially through digital media. The output of the project consists of 10 published papers, 95 talks and posters, 8 Master’s theses, 4 Bachelor’s theses, and two unpublished reports. Two doctoral dissertations are underway, and also a number of articles in journals and conference proceedings.

We collected information on (1) the amount of language input speakers receive, both in Icelandic and English; (2) speakers‘ attitudes towards both languages; (3) speakers‘ Icelandic and English vocabulary; (4) speakers‘ knowledge and use of both Icelandic and English. This information was mainly collected through an online survey sent to 5,000 randomly selected speakers from 3-98 years old, divided into 11 age groups, and by in-depth interviews with 240 speakers selected by special criteria from participants in the online survey. Furthermore, a number of teachers and a few focus groups were interviewed.

The results clearly demonstrate that the environment of Icelandic is changing rapidly. Icelanders, especially children and youngsters, receive a considerable amount of English input. Icelandic children start using smartphones and computers at a much younger age now than just a few years ago. Speakers‘s attitudes towards Icelandic and English are usually positive. However, younger people‘s attitudes towards Icelandic are less positive than the attitudes of the older age groups. In the minds of 13-16 years old teenagers, English seems to be connected to entertainment and travels abroad whereas Icelandic is connected to school assignments and “correct” language usage.

The results also show that the close contact between Icelandic and English that has developed in the past few years has had the effects that Icelandic children are becoming more fluent in English, and a great amount of English in their linguistic environment and general interest in English leads to a greater English vocabulary and better adherence to English linguistic norms. Some of the youngest children also speak English without any Icelandic accent. However, the close contact with English does not seem to have had considerable effects on children‘s knowledge of Icelandic so far. There is some evidence that excessive exposure to English can accelerate linguistic changes that are already ongoing in Icelandic, but we have not found clear evidence for new linguistic changes initiated by English influence. However, it is clear that several English constructions and phrases are sneaking into Icelandic.

In short, we can say that our results indicate that the status of Icelandic is still strong, and the linguistic system does not show any significant indications of weakening. However, the amount of English in the linguistic community has increased considerably in the past few years and a number of sporadic signs of English influence can be spotted in both vocabulary and syntax, especially in the language of children and youngsters.

Participants and their role in the project

Principal Investigators:

Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir, Professor, University of Iceland; Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, Professor Emeritus, University of Iceland

The PIs were scientifically and financially responsible for the project. Sigríður was the main PI. She controlled the design of the online survey and the in-depth interviews, hired assistants, supervised most of the dissertations and theses, and was the daily leader of the project. Furthermore, she has written a number of papers and given a great number of talks on various aspects of the project. Eiríkur took care of the finances and maintained the project’s web site. He also co-supervised three Master’s theses. Furthermore, he has contributed to a number of papers and talks on the project.

Domestic Participants:

Anton Karl Ingason, Assistant Professor, University of Iceland; Ari Páll Kristinsson, Research Professor, The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies; Ásgrímur Angantýsson, Professor, University of Iceland; Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir, Professor, University of Iceland; Guðbjörg Andrea Jónsdóttir, Director, University of Iceland.

Anton Karl, Ari Páll, Ásgrímur and Birna took part in structuring and designing the project. They participated in most of the project meetings and conferences and gave valuable advice on areas of their expertise. Furthermore, they took part in writing papers on individual subjects. Both Anton Karl and Ásgrímur also served as supervisors for Master’s theses.
Guðbjörg Andrea is Director of the Social Science Research Institute. Together with two members from her staff, Helgi Guðmundsson and Margrét Valdimarsdóttir, she implemented the online survey and processed the results.

International Participants:

Elín Þöll Þórðardóttir, Professor, McGill University; Laurel McKenzie, Assistant Professor, New York University; Noel P. Ó Murchadha, Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin; Joel Wallenberg, Associate Professor, Newcastle University; Charles Yang, Professor, University of Pennsylvania.

The international participants all took part in the kick-off meeting where they provided invaluable input on the structure and design of the project. Most of them also participated in the other project meetings. At the final project meeting, they gave their feedback on the project and its results. Apart from this, they were often asked for advice on individual matters. Two of them, Wallenberg and Yang, are members of Iris Edda Nowenstein’s doctoral committee.

Post-Docs:

Anton Karl Ingason, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson

Anton Karl was an essential member of the team in the preparatory phase of the project, formalizing the theoretical and empirical goals, designing the data collection methods, etc. In the beginning of 2017, he started a new job as an associate professor of Icelandic language and language technology at the University of Iceland. However, he continuated to be affiliated with the project and supervised two of the Master’s theses written within the project. He was also Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir’s supervisor and a member of Iris Edda Nowenstein’s doctoral committee.
Einar Freyr Sigurðsson started as a post-doc in the project in the summer of 2017, after finishing his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He took part in designing the in-depth interviews and in analyzing the results of the online survey, etc. In late 2018, he got a job as a research associate professor at The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic studies and thus left the project formally. However, he continued to take part in the project’s activities, for instance the final project meeting in Dublin in August 2019.

Doctoral Students:

Ásrún Jóhannsdóttir, Iris Edda Nowenstein, Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir

Ásrún writes her dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir. In the application, she was listed as a post-doc, but unfortunately, she did not finish her dissertation before the project started, mainly for health reasons. Instead, she worked on the project as a doctoral student and provided valuable assistance in designing vocabulary tests and analyzing the results.
Iris Edda started her doctoral studies in the beginning of 2017, under the supervision of Prof. Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir. She was instrumental in designing the online survey and the in-depth interviews, and her statistical expertise was extremely valuable in analyzing and interpreting the results. In her dissertation, she is testing and extending Charles Yang’s Variational Model of language acquisition, and Yang is both a member of the project and of Iris’ doctoral committee.
Þorbjörg worked as a research assistant in the project for six months before starting her doctoral studies in the beginning of 2018, under the supervision of Assistant Prof. Anton Karl Ingason. She provided valuable input to the design of the in-depth interviews and to statistical analysis of the results.

Master’s students:

Berglind Hrönn Einarsdóttir, Dagbjört Guðmundsdóttir, Elín Þórsdóttir, Hildur Hafsteinsdóttir, Lilja Björk Stefánsdóttir, Max Naylor, Steinunn Valbjörnsdóttir, Tinna Frímann Jökulsdóttir

Max Naylor conducted a pilot survey on Icelanders’ knowledge of English in the beginning of the project. The other Master’s students analyzed results from special aspects of the project, either from the online survey or the in-depth interviews, and wrote their theses on these aspects. Most of them also worked on the project as research assistants.

Research assistants:

Alec Shaw, Berglind Hrönn Einarsdóttir, Bolli Magnússon, Bryndís Bergþórsdóttir, Dagbjört Guðmundsdóttir, Elín Þórsdóttir, Eva Ragnarsdóttir Kamban, Hildur Hafsteinsdóttir, Hinrik Hafsteinsson, Inga Guðrún Eiríksdóttir, Iris Edda Nowenstein, Kristín Þóra Pétursdóttir, Lilja Björk Stefánsdóttir, Oddur Snorrason, Ólöf Björk Sigurðardóttir, Salome Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Sigríður Mjöll Björnsdóttir, Sólrún Hedda Benedikz, Tinna Frímann Jökulsdóttir, Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir, Þórunn Arnardóttir.

Almost all of these people were graduate and undergraduate students. Some of them also worked on their Master’s or Doctoral theses within the project but served as research assistants before and/or after their thesis work. A number of them have used data from the project in their Bachelor’s or Master’s theses.
The research assistants worked on several aspects of the project but mainly on data collection and processing, especially the in-depth interviews. They conducted and transcribed most of the interviews, both in the Reykjavík area and in various places in the countryside. They also conducted and transcribed interviews with focus groups and teachers.

Summary of the project

Main goals

The main goal of the project was to map and analyze the status of the Icelandic language in times of radical societal and technological changes, with special consideration to English influence, especially through digital media. We collected information on (1) the amount of language input speakers receive, both in Icelandic and English; (2) speakers‘ attitudes towards both languages; (3) speakers‘ Icelandic and English vocabulary; (4) speakers‘ knowledge and use of both Icelandic and English.

Thus, we wanted to shed light on the current status and prospective future of Icelandic, mainly by investigating whether increased use of English in the Icelandic language community has already initiated some changes in Icelandic, or accelerated changes that had already originated prior to the digital revolution.

In addition to the main goal, the project had two further theoretical goals. We wanted to extend Yang‘s Variational Model of language acquisition by adding a social dimension. Furthermore, we wanted to lay the ground for a new language vitality scale, since the commonly used scales like UNESCO language vitality scale and EGIDS do not take into account the possible effects of digital language contact on language vitality.

Results

The design of both the online survey and the in-depth interviews turned out to be much more time-consuming than we anticipated. The main reason was that we realized that we had to adapt the questions and the interview methods to four different age groups of children (3-5, 6-7, 8-9, and 10-12). We think this was a good decision but it led to a considerable delay in the data collection phase. Thus, analysis and interpretation of the results is not as advanced as we planned. However, we have a good overview of the main results, even though many details still have to be worked out.

Our results clearly demonstrate that the environment of Icelandic is changing rapidly. Icelanders receive a considerable amount of English input, especially children and youngsters. Icelandic children start using smartphones and computers at a much younger age now than just a few years ago.

Speakers‘s attitudes towards Icelandic and English are usually positive. However, younger people‘s attitudes towards Icelandic are less positive than the attitudes of the older age groups. In the minds of 13-16 years old teenagers, English seems to be connected to entertainment and travels abroad whereas Icelandic is connected to school assignments and „correct“ language.

Our results show that the close contact between Icelandic and English that has developed in the past few years has had the effects that Icelandic children are becoming more fluent in English, and a great amount of English in their linguistic environment and general interest in English leads to a greater English vocabulary and better adherence to English linguistic norms. Some of the youngest children also speak English without any Icelandic accent.

The close contact with English has not had considerable effects on children‘s knowledge of Icelandic so far, even though there is evidence that excessive use of smart devices has a small significant effect on their Icelandic vocabulary, and a great amount of English in the linguistic environment has significant negative effects on children‘s use of the subjunctive in Icelandic.

Our results also show that 16-20 year old speakers who use English a lot are more likely to accept non-traditional use of both subjunctive and indicative moods than speakers of the same age group that receive less English input and use less English. We have not found clear evidence for new linguistic changes initiated by English influence. However, it is clear that several English constructions and phrases are sneaking into Icelandic.

Output

The project arranged a conference with the project participants and six invited speakers in Reykjavík in 2018. In addition, we arranged special workshops devoted to the project at four domestic and two international conferences. An additional workshop had been planned at a domestic conference in March this year, but had to be postponed due to Covid-19.

In total, project members have given 95 talks related to the project at various different occasions. Most of these are scientific talks given at conferences and workshops, but we have also given a number of presentations of the project and individual results in meetings for special interest groups.

In addition to the seven Master’s theses written within the project, one Master’s thesis and four Bachelor’s theses have already used data from the project. We foresee that the data we have collected will be a continuous source for students to use as subject for their theses. For instance, Dagbjört Guðmundsdóttir, who wrote her Master’s thesis within the project, is now a doctoral student in another project but will use data from our project in her doctoral dissertation.

We have collected an immense amount of data within the project, and processing, analyzing and interpreting these data is a much bigger task than could be finalized within the project period. Thus, we will continue to publish results from the project for many years to come.

Impact

The project has received considerable attention from the media and several articles and interviews on the project have been published – even in international media. The Association of Icelandic Teachers invited us to present our results at their annual conference in 2018. We have given a special presentation of our results for the Minister of Education, Science and Culture, and also for the Faroese Minister of Education.

A special presentation of the main results of the project had been planned in early March this year, in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture, but had to be postponed due to Covid-19.

Milestones

Most of the milestones listed in the application were reached (a few of them slightly modified). These are the following:

1st year:
- A kick-off project meeting with all participants will have been held.
- Two small workshops to design and formulate assessment tools will have been held.
- Data collection methods will have been designed.
- Pilot studies will have been conducted in order to test the data collection methods.
- Online survey among 5,000 participants will have been carried out.
2nd year:
- A second project meeting with all participants will have been held.
- Interviews with at least 300 speakers will have been carried out. [The actual number was 240.]
- Data analysis and reporting of results of information gathered in online study will have been carried out.
- A conference with 8 invited participants from abroad will have been held. [The actual number was 6.]
- Three master’s theses will be finished.
- At least three papers will have been submitted to peer-reviewed conferences.
3rd year:
- A third project meeting with all participants will have been held.
- All interviews will have been processed and analysed.
- Theoretical interpretation and modelling of the outcome of the data collection and analysis will be underway.
- Three master’s theses will be finished.
- At least three papers have been submitted to peer-reviewed conferences.
- At least two papers will have been submitted to peer-reviewed international journals.
- At least five more articles will be in preparation.

However, a few milestones were either cancelled or not completely reached. These are the following:

Data will have been collected through social media using crowdsourcing methods. (2^nd)
- We decided to cancel our plans of large-scale crowdsourcing data collection. The reasons were that the main means of data collection, an online survey with 5,000 randomly selected participants and in-depth interviews with 300 participants, were much more time consuming and expensive than we had anticipated. Furthermore, we felt that data from a non-randomly selected group would not add significantly to our knowledge.
Interviews with the remaining 100 speakers will have been carried out. (3^rd)
- We had originally planned to interview 400 speakers. This number was a shot in the dark since it was very difficult to estimate how many interviews we would need to get significant results. As mentioned above, the interviews turned out to be very time consuming – each adult speaker was interviewed twice and children three times. After having interviewed 240 participants we decided that we had reached our goals with this type of data collection. However, we added interviews with a number of teachers and focus groups which were not planned in the application.
A final conference with 12 invited participants from abroad will have been held. (3^rd)
- Our original plans for this conference was to present the results of the project and ask invited participants to interpret them, elaborate on them and put them into a wider context. Since the data collection and processing was delayed, we felt that the time was not ripe for a conference like that. Instead, we used the final project meeting for this purpose and invited one guest to that meeting.
Two doctoral dissertations will be almost finished. (3^rd)
- We had three doctoral students in the project – Ásrún Jóhannsdóttir, Iris Edda Nowenstein and Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir. As mentioned above, Ásrún was originally listed as post-doc, but her dissertation was delayed. She has continued her work within the project and will hopefully defend her dissertation in the near future. Þorbjörg could not start working on her thesis until the project was half way through, and just before the project ended, personal reasons forced her to terminate her studies. However, she made a very valuable contribution to the project in designing interview methods, conducting interviews, The other dissertation, by Iris Edda Nowenstein, is well underway. Since doctoral studies at the Department of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies take four years, it was clear from the beginning that she wouldn’t be able to finish her dissertation within the time frame of the project. She has now received a grant from the University of Iceland Doctoral Fund to continue her studies and finish her dissertation.
A new language vitality index will have been developed. (3^rd)
- We started working on this in collaboration with dr. Sebastian Drude, former Director of the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Institute, who has extensive experience with related work and is one of the authors of UNESCO‘s language vitality scale. Together with him, we wrote a paper outlining the necessity for developing a new scale and proposing some aspects that had to be considered in that work. We realized, however, that developing a completely new scale was too ambitious, especially since Drude left Iceland and our cooperation could not be continued.

Publications

Three papers have already been published in international peer-reviewed conference proceedings and five papers have been published in domestic peer-reviewed journals. In addition, a few manuscripts have been submitted to peer-reviewed conferences and journals. The papers that have been published in scientific journals or conference proceedings are available online in open access.

We have been invited to submit a proposal for a special issue of the international journal Linguistic Vanguard published by Mouton de Gruyter. This proposal, which will be sent shortly, will be reviewed and if accepted, the PIs will guest-edit the volume and a number of other project participants will contribute to it.

A number of papers on results of the project are in progress. Some of them have already been submitted to peer-reviewed journals or conferences, both domestic and international.

Application of the results

The main motivation for the project was theoretical, and its results have a great theoretical value both for generative linguists and sociolinguists, and both for the Icelandic language and language community and also more generally, especially for small language communities. The project participants will continue to analyze and interpret the data that have been collected and write research paper based on them. We also plan to make the bulk of our data publicly available in the future through the CLARIN-IS repository.

In addition, our results also have considerable practical value and we foresee that they will be applied for several purposes in the future. The Minister of Education, Science and Culture, The Directorate of Education, and the Association of Icelandic Teachers have shown great interest in our results and will no doubt make use of them in their policy making in the future. Furthermore, our results are valuable for those who are responsible for the cultivation of the Icelandic language, such as the Icelandic Language Council.

Annual report, 2018

This was officially the third and final year of the grant period. However, since the project didn’t start until July 1st, 2016, we still have six months left. Thus, this report actually covers the second half of the second year of the project, as described in the application, and the first half of the third year.

The milestones for the second project year according to the application were the following:

A second project meeting with all participants will have been held.
Interviews with at least 300 speakers will have been carried out.
Processing and analysis of the interviews will have started.
Data analysis and reporting of results of information gathered in online study will have been carried out.
Data will have been collected through social media using crowdsourcing methods.
A conference with 8 invited participants from abroad will have been held.
Three master’s theses will be finished.
At least three papers will have been submitted to peer-reviewed conferences.

The progress made in 2018 was as follows:

The second project meeting with all participants was held in August, in combination with a conference with invited participants (see below).
Around 210 interviews with both adults and children (and their parents) had been completed by the end of the year.
All the interviews have been transcribed and processing and analysis has started.
Data analysis and reporting of results of information gathered in the online study has been carried out by the Social Science Research Institute.
A conference with 6 invited participants from abroad was held in August, in combination with a general project meeting (se above).
Four master’s theses were completed, in addition to one completed in 2017.
12 papers have been submitted to international peer-reviewed conferences.

Thus, all of the milestones set for the second project year have been reached or nearly so, except one: We still haven’t started collecting data through social media using crowdsourcing methods. This will be done in the first half of 2019. We are currently working towards the milestones set for the third and final project year, which will officially end on June 30th, 2019. However, we expect to be working on the project throughout this year in order to tie some loose ends.

The Social Science Research Institute delivered two detailed reports on the online survey – one for the adults’ survey (13 years and up) and one for the children’s survey (3-12 years). Helgi Guðmundsson and Margrét Valdimarsdóttir from the SSRI did the statistical analysis of the results and wrote the report. The project leaders, the post-doc Einar Freyr Sigurðsson and the doctoral students Iris Edda Nowenstein and Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir have since been analyzing the results, with the assistance of Margrét Valdimarsdóttir, and giving a number of talks based on them (see below and Deliverables). Four master’s students also made use of the results in their theses (see below) and two of them have continued working on the project.

The bulk of the work in 2018 was devoted to the in-depth interviews which have been very time-consuming. In addition to the master’s students working on the project, we hired a number of undergraduate student assistants to carry out the interviews. Each adult is interviewed twice, up to two hours each time, and the children are interviewed three times, up to one hour each time. Their parents are also interviewed. All the interviews are recorded and transcribed. This has demanded a lot of organizational work, especially since a number of the interviewees live outside the Reykjavík area. Our student assistants conducted several day trips to the south and west and longer trips to the north and east.

The project arranged its own conference, MoLiCoDiLaCo-Conference on Language Contact, on August 28th, with 10 talks – four by project participants and six by invited speakers (András Kornai, Silvina Montrul, Anne Mette Sunde, Zakaris Svabo Hansen, Sarah G. Thomason and Øystein Vangsnes). Four of our international collaborators also participated in the conference, in addition to the domestic participants. The conference was followed by a closed meeting of project participants and invited speakers on August 29th.

The project arranged workshops at two domestic conferences in 2018. These were “Stafrænt málsambýli íslensku og ensku” (Digital Language Contact between Icelandic and English) at Hugvísindaþing, the annual conference of the Institute of Humanities at the University of Iceland, on March 10th (nine talks), and “Greining á málfræðilegum afleiðingum stafræns málsambýlis” (Modeling the Linguistic Consequences of Digital Language Contact) at Menntakvika, the annual conference of the School of Education at the University of Iceland, on October 12th (four talks).

The project arranged workshops or colloquia at two international conferences in 2018. These were “Digital language contact in ELL” at the Early Language Learning Conference which was held in Reykjavík on June 13th-15th (five talks), and “The Linguistic Consequences of Digital Language Contact” at the Nordic Dialect Conference which was held in Reykjavík on August 20th-22nd (five talks).

Project participants gave a talk at GALANA 8 in Bloomington, Indiana, on September 28th, and three talks at the 32nd Rask Conference in Reykjavík, January 27th.

The project leaders were invited to present the project on several occasions, such as in a lecture series organized by Societas Scientiarum Islandica, at the annual conference of The Icelandic Teacher’s Union on October 4th, and at a conference on literacy arranged by Heimili og skóli (Home and School – the National Parents Association) on November 2nd. Furthermore, the project leaders were interviewed a number of times by TV and radio stations and newspapers – see Links.

Four master‘s theses were written within the project in 2018; on the amount of digital language input that Icelanders are exposed to (Dagbjört Guðmundsdóttir), on Icelanders‘ communication with digital assistants (Tinna Frímann Jökulsdóttir), on speakers‘ attitudes towards Icelandic and English (Lilja Björk Guðmundsdóttir) and on the effects of English input on an ongoing change in Icelandic (Elín Þórsdóttir).

Einar Freyr Sigurðsson quit as a post-doc in the project by the end of September, since he was hired as an assistant research professor at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. Iris Edda Nowenstein worked on the project for the whole year, and Ásrún Jóhannsdóttir worked half-time on the project as a doctoral student for most of the year.

A new doctoral student, Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir, entered the project on January 1st. She is working on feature mismatches in Icelandic agreement under the supervision of Anton Karl Ingason. She will collect her data through the project but the thesis will mostly be written after the end of the project.

Annual report, 2017

Even though this was the second year of the grant period, it must be kept in mind that the project didn’t start until July 1st, 2016. Thus, we are actually only half way into the second project year by the end of 2017.

The milestones for the first project year according to the application were the following:

A kick-off project meeting with all participants will have been held.
Two small workshops to design and formulate assessment tools will have been held.
Data collection methods will have been designed.
Pilot studies will have been conducted in order to test the data collection methods.
Online survey among 5,000 participants will have been carried out.
Two doctoral students will have started working on their projects.
One Master’s student will have started working on her thesis.

The kick-of meeting was held in October 2016, as reported in the last annual report. The status of the other milestones is as follows:

Instead of the two small workshops that we planned to hold in Iceland, we had one informal workshop with five people from the project (three from Iceland, two from America) in connection to a conference in Georgetown, Washington DC, in March, and another informal workshop with several people from the project (one from abroad) in connection to the NELS conference in Reykjavík in October.
Data collection methods for the online surveys have been designed, but we will continue to develop methods for the other types of data collection.
Pilot studies to test data collection methods have been conducted, and the questionnaires altered and improved according to the results of these studies.
Invitation letters for the online survey were sent out to 3,500 people from the age of 13 and up in July, and to (parents of) 1,500 children age 3-12 in November. Targeted response rate in the survey was set to 60% in our contract with the Social Science Research Institute.
One doctoral student, Iris Edda Nowenstein, started working on her project in the beginning of 2017.
One master’s student wrote his thesis in connection to the project in the spring of 2017 (graduated in October). Three master’s students have been working on the project since May 2017, assisting in developing data collection methods and the online questionnaires. They have also been experimenting with interviewing focus groups.

Thus, all of the milestones set for the first project year have been reached, and we are working towards the milestones set for the second project year, which will end on June 30th, 2018.

Devising the questionnaires for the online survey proved to be much more complicated and time-consuming than we had anticipated. We realized that we had to make five different versions of the survey – one for adults, and four for different age groups of children (3-5, 6-7, 8-9, 10-12). Since our questionnaires didn’t have any precedents, we had to design them almost from scratch, especially the children versions. Together with the fact that it has taken much longer than expected to reach the targeted response rate, this is the reason why the online survey isn’t finished yet.

Originally, we planned to start the in-depth interviews in the first half of the second project year, after we had received a preliminary statistical analysis and report of the information gathered in the online survey from the Social Science Research Institute. Since the online survey isn’t finished for reasons explained above, we have not been able to start the interviews yet, but they will be well underway by the end of the second project year this summer.

Instead, our student assistants have been interviewing specially selected focus groups and primary and secondary school teachers in order to gather information about children and young people’s use of English and their attitudes towards English and Icelandic. Researchers from the Social Science Research Institute have given two lectures on qualitative research methods and interview methods for participants in the project. One master’s student made a pilot study of Icelanders’ knowledge of English and wrote his master’s thesis about the results.

One of the main aims of the project is to develop a new language vitality index. We have initiated cooperation with dr. Sebastian Drude, director of the Vigdís World Language Center, who is one of the authors of the UNESCO Language Vitality Index. Drude and a number of participants in the project co-authored a paper on digital vitality and minoritization which was presented at a conference in Portugal in October.

Anton Karl Ingason quit as a post-doc in the project by the end of 2016, since he was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Iceland from January 1st, 2017. However, he has continued as a member of the project team. He was replaced by Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, who started working on the project after he finished his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania last spring.

Ásrún Jóhannsdóttir worked half-time on the project as a doctoral student for most of the year. Sigríður Mjöll Björnsdóttir, M.A., worked on the project as a doctoral student in the spring semester. One master’s student (Max Naylor) worked on the project for three months and wrote his master’s thesis in connection with the project, as mentioned above. Three master’s students worked on the project full time from May through August, and half-time from then on throughout the year. Two other master’s students also worked on the project for a few weeks each.

Our doctoral student, Iris Edda Nowenstein, attended the LSA Summer Institute of Linguistics in Lexington, Kentucky, in July. She finished four courses there and presented a poster related to the project. This falls under our student exchange program planned in the application.

Annual report, 2016

Since the grant allocation wasn’t announced until March 21st, it was decided after consulting with RANNÍS staff that the actual project period would start on July 1st, 2016, and the project would run until June 30th, 2019. Thus, the project has only been running for six months (actually five, since July is a vacation month). This means of course that not all of the milestones for the first year have been reached.

In the beginning of October, we had a very successful kick-off meeting attended by all the international participants in addition to all the local project members. We have been working on the data collection methods and preparing the pilot study and the online survey. This preparatory work has been carried out in close cooperation with the Social Science Research Institute, which will conduct the online survey.

One post-doc, Anton Karl Ingason, started working on the project on July 1st. Ásrún Jóhannsdóttir has been working half-time as a doctoral student since July 1st. Four Master’s students have also been recruited for the project and three of them participated in the kick-off meeting.

Preparations, 2015

The idea of forming a research group to study the current status of Icelandic and possible influence from English emerged in April 2015 and the first meeting of the prospective participants was held on April 19th. On that meeting, it was decided to aim for a Grant of Excellence from the Icelandic Research Fund. A number of preparatory meetings were held during the summer, but the bulk of the application was written in August and delivered to the Research Fund on September 1st, 2015.