Breytingar, viðhorf og veruleiki: Félagsmálvísindalegar rannsóknir á íslensku málsamfélagi

Málvísindastofnun Háskóla Íslands og Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum efna til ráðstefnunnar Changes, beliefs, practices: Current research into the contemporary sociolinguistic situation in Iceland í fyrirlestrasal Eddu 18. og 19. september kl. 9.30–17.00. Fluttir verða tuttugu fyrirlestrar í fimm málstofum: Ideologies & metalinguistic discourses; Linguistic minorities; Lifespan changes, attitudes & regional pronunciation; English in Iceland; Norms & cultural bias. Aðgangur að ráðstefnunni er ókeypis og er hún öllum opin án skráningar. Hún fer fram á ensku. Ráðstefnustjórn skipa Ari Páll Kristinsson, Iris Nowenstein og Stefanie Bade. Ráðstefnan er haldin með stuðningi Árnastofnunar og Málvísindastofnunar Háskóla Íslands.

Dagskrá 18. september

9.30 Opening
 

9.45 Keynote   —  Leigh Oakes, professor at Queen Mary University í London: Beyond the taboo: reevaluating normativity in language policy and planning research.

Abstract: The critical and ethnographic turns that have come to dominate mainstream language policy and planning (LPP) research in recent decades have resulted in a reluctance to engage positively with the inevitably normative concerns of language policymakers. This talk calls for a more productive re-engagement with such concerns, in particular through a reevaluation of the notion of normativity in LPP research. After briefly defining what is meant by normativity, the talk identifies four broad types of normative intervention observed in LPP practice. It then examines how the readiness of LPP researchers in the pioneer years to engage positively with such interventions has been largely lost due to advances in the field. The talk argues nonetheless that normativity is not only inevitable in language matters, but can also be justified in many instances of LPP practice. To evaluate which normative LPP interventions can be deemed acceptable and which should not, mainstream LPP research can benefit from the input of normative political theory. In particular, the emergent interdisciplinary field of ‘normative language policy’, which seeks to bring together research in normative political theory and applied/sociolinguistics, can help to bridge the arguably growing gap between LPP practice and research.
 

10.45 Coffee break
 

11.00 Ideologies & metalinguistic discourses  

Iris Nowenstein & Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir: Perceived threats to the future of Icelandic and the importance of language acquisition research.

Abstract: In this talk, we review a recent shift in the public narrative of perceived threats to the future of Icelandic. We show that the focus has in part moved away from an assumed causal relationship between an increased, digitally mediated English presence in Iceland and children’s poorer proficiency in Icelandic, towards the rise of English as a lingua franca in the interactions of L1 and L2 speakers of Icelandic. This shift will be discussed in terms of recent research on Icelandic language acquisition (the MoLiCoDiLaCo-project 2016–2019), multilingualism, so-called linguistic gatekeeping, and the preservation of globally small languages. We argue that although the societal changes of the 21st century are bound to create some rupture with the linguistic and cultural heritage of previous, largely monolingual generations, increased multilingualism should not be perceived as a threat to the future of Icelandic, unless said future is defined under the lens of traditional purism and prescriptivism. In our view, an ideology of sustainable multilingualism should form the core of language planning in future efforts to preserve Icelandic, instead of the ‘make Icelandic great again’-threat-oriented approach prominent in the public discourse.

Stefanie Bade: Why are accents perceived as (un)pleasant and (in)correct? Folk evaluations of L2 accent in Icelandic.

Abstract: As the number of L2 speakers of Icelandic has continuously risen in the past decades, it is interesting to investigate how correct and pleasant those accents are evaluated by L1 speakers of Icelandic and what drives these evaluations. This is of particular concern in light of long-standing linguistic purism and a stable evaluation system for the L1 variety. In this talk, I report on a qualitative study involving five focus groups with thirty-two L1-speaker participants who were presented with six verbal guises: one L1 speaker and five L2 speakers of Icelandic. Adopting a folk-linguistic approach, the participants commented on those guises according to the concepts of pleasantness and correctness. Data analysis resulted in several themes which indicate that evaluations of L2 accents are affected by perceptions of listener effort as to both pleasantness and correctness. Assessment of pleasantness of L2 accents was further influenced by perceptions of familiarity with the accents. As to correctness, the outcomes suggest that linguistic subsystems other than pronunciation might be better suited for evaluations of L2 speech in the Icelandic context.
 

12.00 Lunch break
 

13.30 Ideologies & metalinguistic discourses ctd.

Ari Páll Kristinsson & Kristján Árnason: Shifting language-political discourses in Iceland in late modernity.

Abstract: The analysis of Icelandic discourses on language policies presented in this talk suggests that there has been a shift, from the ideologies of the late 20th century with their focus on lexical purism and preservation of traditional grammar forms, followed around the turn of the century by an intermediate phase with greater focus on status issues. Finally, in the current late modern context, we are witnessing a transformation of language discourses, with increased focus placed on speakers as regards language attitudes, tolerance, inclusion, and ethical language use. 

Ingunn Hreinberg Indriðadóttir: Prescriptivist discourse and dangerous speech.

Abstract: Dangerous speech is any speech that increases the risk of its audience accepting or participating in violence against a particular group. Dangerous speech can appear in various social contexts, including prescriptivist discourse where language preservation and purist ideologies can become the basis for othering. Icelandic language policy has always been marked by purist ideologies where the main themes are fear of language decline and the desire to preserve the language in its purest form. These themes are also reflected in prescriptivist discourse, suggesting that speakers' conservative attitude towards the Icelandic language is part of the Icelandic national identity. A mixed national identity can include elements that contradict each other, e.g. an Icelandic speaker can be proud of belonging to a nation that is progressive in humanitarian matters, but they can also be proud of its conservative language policies and linguistic heritage. This study presents an analysis of how dangerous speech is manifested in prescriptivist discourse in Iceland and how it can provide a platform for the spread of prejudice and hatred that threatens the safety of the marginalized groups it targets.

14.30 Coffee break

15.00 Linguistic minorities      

Rannveig Sverrisdóttir: Icelandic Sign Language: Status, threats and hopes. 

Abstract: Icelandic Sign Language is the only indigenous minority language of Iceland. It is a minority language with approximately 200-300 native speakers. Its status was secured by the Law on the Status of Icelandic and Icelandic Sign Language in 2011, and this year, a parliamentary resolution on language policy and an action plan for Icelandic Sign Language was passed. Despite these positive measures, the number of users is declining, putting the language at risk of endangerment. This decline can be attributed to negative language ideologies and doubts about the legitimacy of Icelandic Sign Language. Interviews with native speakers reveal that beliefs about sign languages are generally unsupportive, highlighting negative ideologies as a key threat to the language. This situation mirrors aspects of coloniality. There is hope that increased self-management by the language minority, with more native signers taking the lead, could improve the situation and ensure that Icelandic Sign Language is recognized in practice, not just in policy.

Anna Maria Wojtyńska & Unnur Dís Skaptadóttir: Language politics and immigrants' inclusion in local governance.

Abstract: In October 2022, Vík, a small town on the South coast of Iceland, hit the headlines as the first town in Iceland to appoint English speaking council in the municipality. The mayor of the town explained that the reason for setting up the council was to enable a large group of residents to participate in the local governance and give them an opportunity to shape the future of the town. With the intense development of tourism, particularly pronounced in the south of Iceland, Vik’s population doubled just within 10 years. A large part of the increase can be attributed to the arrival of foreign workers. In 2022, the migrants made up about half of the town’s total population. Although the majority come as seasonal workers, many keep prolonging their stay and some are considering settling down. The migrants form a quite diverse community, and English gradually becomes a lingua franca of the town. Is Vík inevitably heading towards official bilingualism? Will the English council help immigrant inclusion or does it risk creating parallel communities? The presentation builds on data gathered during three months of ethnographic research that were part of the larger project looking at mobility in the rural areas in Iceland.

Lara Hoffmann: Of 'Creating Mountains' and 'Known Paths': Adult immigrants' engagement with the language situation in Iceland. 

Abstract: Increasing migration to Iceland raised the need to better understand how newcomers navigate the linguistic environment. Prior research has revealed diverse approaches by immigrants to using and learning languages in Iceland, as well as a somewhat complex relationship between prevailing language ideologies and immigrants' positions. This presentation explores present ways of thinking about language in Iceland. Metaphors are applied as a guidance to understand prevailing positions and paradoxes. This study draws on various quantative and qualitative studies conducted among immigrants in Iceland between 2020 and 2024. The insights aim to depict beliefs about language and how they shape ways of thinking and acting among adult migrants and stakeholders in Iceland.

Renata Emilsson Peskova: Plurilingual children in Icelandic language landscape and stakeholders’ values about languages. 

Abstract: A diverse group of children and adolescents attend the country's preschools and primary and secondary schools. They study and live in a multilingual environment that places high demands and expectations on their Icelandic language proficiency and academic success. At the same time, the environment also conveys explicit and implicit messages about the value of other languages within the country's linguistic landscape. This presentation will present and discuss research on the linguistic resources of plurilingual students, and situate them within the language policies of Iceland, the Nordic countries, and Europe. The value of languages for speakers, families, education, and society will be examined from inclusion and social equity perspectives.

17.00 Closing of day one   

Dagskrá 19. september

9.30 Lifespan changes, attitudes & regional pronunciation. 

Stefanie Bade & Eva Hrund Sigurjónsdóttir: Icelandic regional pronunciation and linguistic change in real time: latest results from the RePARC project. 

Abstract: In this talk, we provide an overview of the aims and methods used in the Regional pronunciation, attitudes and real-time change (RePARC) research project and report on the latest results from the phonological analysis of the project's reading task. The participants from two different regions (northern Iceland, southern Iceland, and a so-called neutral area), and aged 12-96, completed a pronunciation test, which aimed at mapping the current distribution of regional pronunciation in Iceland and at shedding light on linguistic change by comparing the results with earlier studies. Focussing on four regional variables, i.e. hard speech and voiced pronunciation, which are common in the north and northeast of Iceland, and hv-pronunciation and monophtongal pronunciation, which are typical for the south and southeast of Iceland, results indicate that voiced pronunciation and hv-pronunciation are fading out, while monophthongal pronunciation and, particularly, hard speech are maintained in their respective core areas.

Stefanie Bade & Ása Bergný Tómasdóttir: Icelandic regional pronunciation, attitudes and folk beliefs: latest results from the RePARC project. 

Abstract: In this talk, we present the latest results from the attitude part of the Regional pronunciation, attitudes and real-time change (RePARC) research project. Firstly, we report on selected results from an online survey with 960 participants who listened to two audio recordings including regional pronunciation different from their home area. The participants answered questions directed at attitudes towards variation and awareness as well as attitudes towards their own way of speaking and its importance for self-identity. Concentrating on four regional variables, i.e. hard speech and voiced pronunciation, which are common in the north and northeast of Iceland, and hv-pronunciation and monophtongal pronunciation, which are typical for the south and southeast of Iceland, results suggest that participants find the northern features to be more easily recognisable, and at the same time, these features seem to be more closely linked to speakers' self-identity than other regional features. Secondly, we present the results of a thematic analysis based on in-depth interviews with the 23 oldest survey participants, aged 91–95. These interviews offer deeper insights into laypeople's awareness of regional pronunciation in Iceland, its evaluation, and the impact of these perceptions on speakers' linguistic security and overall self-identity.

10.30 Coffee break
 

10.45 Lifespan changes, attitudes & regional pronunciation ctd.

Anton Karl Ingason:  EILisCh - A big project on lifespan change.

Abstract: In this presentation, I discuss an ongoing project on sociolinguistic lifespan change that recently started at the University of Iceland. The project is called Explaining Individual Lifespan change and it is funded by the European Research Council (ERC). In this project, we focus on changes in linguistic behavior of Icelandic parliament members. The project involves patterns found in parliament speeches as well as interviews with the parliament members in question. I will give a general overview of the project and describe some preliminary results from what we have learned so far. That includes a study co-authored with Lilja Björk Stefánsdóttir on the changes of formality levels in the speeches of Steingrímur J. Sigfússon, the former finance minister of Iceland. In this sample of data, we find that changes in linguistic market value over time correlate with the use of formal vs. informal types of word order, focusing on the linguistic phenomenon of Stylistic Fronting. Further case studies will be discussed in Lilja's presentation. 

Lilja Björk Stefánsdóttir & Anton Karl Ingason: Lifespan change in the Icelandic Parliament. 

Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss a couple of case studies on lifespan change in the speech of Icelandic politicians, carried out within the EILisCh-project. We argue that some changes observed are linked to the speakers' Linguistic Market Value (Sankoff and Laberge 1978) while others result from active identity construction (e.g. Ari Páll Kristinsson 2021, Stefánsdóttir and Ingason forthcoming). The findings from our studies demonstrate how a fine-grained view of a syntactic lifespan change yields insights about status-associated usage. Our findings also provide evidence of the importance of a high-definition approach (Stefánsdóttir and Ingason 2018, 2019, forthcoming), that is, using comprehensive and continuous linguistic data derived from corpora, due to the complex and fluctuating nature of individual lifespan change.
 

11.45  Lunch break
 

13.00 English in Iceland  

Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir: The Status of English in Iceland:  Findings from Two Projects. 

Abstract: This presentation describes the findings of two longitudinal studies on the effects of the spread of English as a world language in Iceland, a speech community with a fully fledged national language.  Findings suggest that English has become a dominant force in education and the workforce with minimum public awareness or official intervention.

Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir & Iris Nowenstein: Learning the majority language of a small speech community in the age of global English. 

Abstract: Rising public concern regarding the linguistic effects of increased digital English input in Iceland was one of the factors motivating the research project “Modeling the Linguistic Consequences of Digital Language Contact” (MoLiCoDiLaCo) in 2016–2019. In public discourse, a causal relationship between children’s exposure to English through digital media and reduced/incompletely acquired Icelandic has been assumed, without scientific evidence. While the MoLiCoDiLaCo project sought to provide evidence for this assumption, the results did not indicate large scale effects of the globally dominant English on the domestically dominant but globally small Icelandic. In this talk, we review the main results from the 3–12-year-old monolingual children’s part (n=724) of the project, focusing on the amount of Icelandic and English input that the children received, their language use and competence, and attitudes towards both languages. The results indicate that English digital language input contributed more to the children’s L2 English skills (vocabulary and grammar) than it affected their L1 Icelandic. Moreover, the children’s attitudes towards the two languages were quite different, as they associated Icelandic with compulsory school assignments and learning to speak and write Icelandic “correctly”, whereas English was associated with entertainment in the digital world and travel abroad.

14.00 Norms & cultural bias

Ari Páll Kristinsson: On the description-prescription continuum. 

Abstract: There has been a need to explicitly make a distinction between description and prescription in modern linguistics, but despite the fundamentally different nature of the two concepts the boundary between them is not always that clear in practice. The perception of a simple prescriptive-descriptive dichotomy has been challenged in recent research into prescription and prescriptivism, for different reasons. Some arguments that have been put forward in that context will be brought up, and a few Icelandic cases will be presented that can add further support to the stance that a description-prescription continuum must be acknowledged. 

Einar Freyr Sigurðsson & Jóhannes B. Sigtryggsson: The Icelandic Gigaword Corpus and the Icelandic linguistic standard. 

Abstract: The introduction of gigaword corpora has transformed studies of languages in recent years. For example, the lexicographer and language usage expert Bryan A. Garner said in an interview in 2023: "I’m capitalizing on big data, which makes GMEU [Garner's Modern English Usage] entries empirically grounded in a way that earlier usage books couldn't be. This is a great era for lexicographers and grammarians: we can assess word frequencies in various databases that include millions of published and spoken instances of a word or phrase" (OUP Blog, 2023). The most important language database for Icelandic in this regard is the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus (IGC), which has influenced studies of the language in recent years. It is interesting to look at it in connection with the Icelandic linguistic standard and traditional prescriptive rules for Icelandic. What impact should this new mass of data have on prescriptive advice? What guidelines can be made, and should old prescriptive rules be discarded if there is no or minimal evidence for their use even in large corpora? We will discuss this possible tug of war between the data and prescriptive rules.

15.00 Coffee break
 

15.30 Norms & cultural bias ctd.

Heimir Freyr Viðarsson: Intervention and the interface principle: Norms and usage in 21st-century student essays.

Abstract: The malleability of language (or, indeed, lack thereof) has long been a matter of scholarly interest in the literature (e.g. Müller 1861; Friðriksson 1871; Halldórsson 1960; Haugen 1987; Jahr 1989, 2014; Ottósson 1990, 2005; Árnason 2003; Kusters 2003; van der Sijs 2004; Bennis 2005; Sigurðsson 2006; Weerman 2006; Auer 2009; Hinrichs et al. 2015; Anderwald 2016; van der Meulen & van der Sijs 2020; Viðarsson 2024, among many others). In terms of its often-cited ineffectiveness, language ‘awareness’ stands central in discussion of language intervention or implementation of the standard language at the community level, for instance as a part of varyingly orchestrated efforts within the public education system. This state of affairs could be argued to follow from the purported unobservability of abstract linguistic structure, known as Labov’s Interface Principle (Labov 1993, 2001; Ingason et al. 2011, 2013). In this paper I examine selected linguistic variables from the prescriptive grammar tradition using a corpus of compulsory school and matriculation exam essays (2000–2007), which suggest at least mild effects of prescriptivism. A particular focus of this contribution is how the results relate to the hypothesis that language awareness is ‘on the surface of language’, not beyond, and what this could mean in matters of language education.  

Steinunn Rut Friðriksdóttir: Detecting prejudice in large language models. 

Abstract: Large language models (such as ChatGPT) are changing how we interact with technology, but they come with inherent biases. This presentation explores gender bias in LLMs trained on Icelandic data, specifically examining occupation-related terms. The grammatical structure of Icelandic, which generally defaults to masculine forms, provides an interesting case study. The idea is to analyze whether these models simply mirror real-world gender distributions in professions or if they show biases connected to grammatical gender. The results indicate a general tendency towards masculine forms, yet certain occupations consistently lean towards specific genders. This suggests a complex relationship between societal factors and linguistic features in LLMs, contributing to our understanding of how these models handle gender in highly inflected languages like Icelandic.

16.30 Closing session

Kristján Árnason: Language death: three scenarios for Icelandic.

Abstract:  I want to reflect briefly upon three warnings or predictions that have been made in the past foreseeing the death of the Icelandic language. The first is a poem from the 18th century by Eggert Ólafsson. The second is the commonly quoted statement by Rasmus Rask in a letter from 1813 that Icelandic will be ousted by Danish. The last is the recent warning that if nothing is done Icelandic will suffer “digital death”. Fortunately, none of these predictions have been borne out, but I want to consider whether it makes any sense to talk about the “death” of our beloved language. What do people mean when they make such predictions: formal decay, loss of domain, or both?

17.00 Closing of the conference  

Leigh Oakes, prófessor við Queen Mary University í London.