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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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?