| Summary: | The research project Modeling the Linguistic Consequences of Digital Language Contact (Ice. Greining á málfræðilegum afleiðingum stafræns málsambýlis) aims to investigate and model the linguistic consequences of digital language contact, using the rise of English in the Icelandic language community as a test case. This is a three-year project (2016- 2019) financed by a Grant of Excellence from the Icelandic Research Fund awarded to Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir and Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, professors at the University of Iceland. A number of other Icelandic and international researchers also participate in the project, in addition to three doctoral students and a number of graduate and undergraduate students. The first half of this paper is a description of the goals and methodology of the project, whereas the second half presents the first results from an online survey of four age groups of 3?12-year-old children, where the focus is on their digital, productive, and receptive English usage.The main empirical goal of the project is to construct a nationwide profile of the distribution and nature of English and Icelandic input in the Icelandic language community in the digital age and the differences in linguistic knowledge that arise as a result of such novel types of intense encounters with English. The main theoretical goal is to integrate sociological factors and bilingualism into the evolving field of models which derive the linguistic knowledge of speakers from the quantified distribution of input in acquisition, as well as from hypothesized constraints on possible languages. In particular, our work will extend Yang’s (2002) Variational Model of Language Acquisition. Furthermore, we aim to develop an index of language vitality designed for measuring effects of digital language contact.The implementation of the project includes an online survey sent to a stratified random sample of 5,000 speakers aged 3-98. The purpose is to obtain information on the amount and nature of input the speakers receive in English and ...
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