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Hey nørdar! Føroyskt-enskt málsamband í teldusamskifti

Abstract The purpose of this empirical study is a detailed examination of the use of English nouns in the context of written Faroese in computermediated communication. The data is derived from one of the biggest Faroese online forums, Kjak.org. As this approach is unprecedented in the linguistic study of the Faroese language, the methodology will be based on comparable investigations into Faroese and other Scandinavian languages. However, the focus will be original in nature, due to the phenomena observed in the data. Paying attention to various variables that come into play in computer-mediated communication in general, such as the influence of features found in spoken language, as well as complex multilingualism, this paper will scrutinise aspects of both morphological and orthographical integration of English nouns. Most strikingly, unlike in previous studies on English loanwords in Faroese, the language material investigated here displays a wide range of creative ad-hoc strategies for solving a number of linguistic problems, such as the marking of morphological boundaries, ad-hoc gender assignment, <ð> as a means of breaking the hiatus etc. As the virtual absence of normative pressure in computer-mediated communication seems to be pivotal in this context, the role of language ideology will also be discussed in this paper.


Introduction
20 years ago, Jóansson (1997: 217) observed that " [o]nly some of the most recent not-naturalised loanwords do not comply with the [...] conventions [of Faroese spelling and grammar] so far; therefore they are in most cases avoided in the written lan guage". A decade later, Simonsen and Sandøy (2008: 60) hypothesised that the absence of certain inflectional forms in their data may have been caused by a reluctance on the part of the respective language user(s) to implement morphological modifications when the orthographic form of the loanword contained certain features such as a silent final <-e>, e.g. in interface. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether hypotheses like this one could be verified or falsified in the context of Faroese-English computer-mediated com munica tion.
The results indicate that computer mediated communication (henceforth CMC) with its conceptionally oral nature does indeed exhibit strikingly different language use patterns. This paper also aims to demon strate how CMC is a worthwhile re-search area for those interested in getting an in vitro insight into ongoing contact-induced language change. From a sociolinguistic point of view, the results also confirm the fact that the Internet appears to be one of the strongest promoters of English as a World language (henceforth EWL) with regard to the Faroese speech community. So far, this has only been measured in terms of language attitudes by Jacobsen (2012: 68f.), who noted in his study that acceptance towards English loans and even a predilection for them over their Faroese equivalents was highest among those informants who owned a computer with Internet access.
The following research questions are central to this paper: a) To what extent and in which regards do Faroese language users in the context of CMC integrate English loanwords or code-switches into their mother-tongue? Which observations can be made re garding e.g. inflectional classes, gender assign ment and orthographic adaptation processes? b) Does this linguistic nativisation occur more or less frequently in CMC than in the language material examined in previous studies (i.e. "traditional" print media such as newspapers or novels)? If so, why? Do notions of language ideology have any bearing on how foreign langu age material is treated by the Faroese in the context of CMC?
In order to find adequate answers, we will first explore the relationship between the two languages involved. Then, a distinc-tion between code-switching and borrowing will be made, before CMC and its distinctive features will be outlined. In the main chapter 5, the language material will be analysed, with a particular focus on certain morphological and orthographic integration patterns. Finally, these will be summarised and discussed in the wider context of language contact, ideology, and change.

Contact between Faroese and English
During the Second World War, the Faroe Islands came into very close contact with the English speech community as they were occupied by the British from 1940 to 1945, whose military airbase in Vágar became the country's first and only civil airport in the 60s (Jóansson, 1997: 164). Their impact on the locals is not to be underestimated, since back then, the islands only counted around 30,000 native inhabitants (Jóansson, 1997: 164). Many loans from this era bear witness to the intimate language contact during that period (Jóansson, 1997: 164f.). In fact, the impact the English language has had on Faroese goes back further than the 20 th century. In his comprehensive lexicological study, Jóansson (1997) lists loans that had entered the Faroese language even before the 17 th century. Some of them are actually highly frequent in everyday usage -e.g. trupul/ trupulleiki 'trouble', an old loan borrowed from between 1600 and 1800 (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 446). Nevertheless, the most intense period of language contact between Faroese and English arguably started when the latter gained its status as a world language in the second half of the 20 th century. At the beginning of the 21 st century, the global spread of English has reached an unparalleled scale, since no other known language can be said to have had a gain of up to one-and-a-half to two billion speakers within a period of 400 years (Kachru, 1985: 11;Crystal, 2003: 110;Jenkins, 2003: 2;Melchers and Shaw, 2003: 8). English does not only act as a foreign language in many countries, but also serves intranational purposes in various social, cultural, commercial and educational domains (Berns, 1995: 8f.;Jenkins, 2003: 14). As it is used more often in non-native-speaker contexts than in those involving native speakers (Modiano, 1999: 22;Graddol, 2006: 29;Berns, 2009), it is best described as English as a lingua franca (henceforth ELF), i.e. "basically a mode of communication […] which can have various varieties" and which "encompasses all types of communication among bilingual users of English in the Expanding Circle" (Cogo, 2008: 58).
ELF has entered Europe from two directions, namely top-down and bottom-up (Seidlhofer et al., 2006: 5). In this context, the top-down dimension involves more or less officially institutionalised, normative language contact in all kinds of educational or professional domains; while bottom-up refers to the mostly unregulated contact at the individual level "through popular music, dance, sports, or computers" (Seidlhofer et al., 2006: 5). Indeed, " [p]art of the explanation for the strength of the popularity of English is this synergy between top-down and bottom-up processes" (Phillipson, 2003: 89). The Scandinavian countries can be regarded as a prime example of the extent to which EWL can permeate and dominate the mass media from below, its most important vehicle being products of popular culture such as TV series, movies and online entertainment (Preisler, 1999: 241f.). It is therefore not uncommon for native speakers of the same language, e.g. Danish, as studied by Preisler (1999: 241f.), or as will be shown in this study, Faroese, to routinely include English language material in their conversations.
Thus, English leaves its traces in the languages it comes into contact with. While its long-term effect is most visible in the form of lexical borrowings, one of the short-term manifestations is codeswitching (Cogo, 2008: 58). Both will be the subject of the next section.

Borrowing vs. code-switching
Code-switching refers to the use of at least two different codes by bilinguals (or multilinguals) within one conversation or one text (Myers-Scotton, 2006: 239). It can either occur in consecutive turns between speakers, between sentences in the same speaker's turn (inter-sentential), or within a sentence (intra-sentential or inter-clausal) (Myers-Scotton, 2006: 239). In this process, the different codes usually fulfil distinct functions (Treffers-Daller, 2009: 66f.). As the dominant code, the matrix language is the one providing the main morphosyntactic frame determining the well-formedness of a sentence (Myers-Scotton, 2006: 241, 243). The embedded language merely participates, mainly by contributing lexical elements (Myers-Scotton, 2006: 243). In the present study, Faroese serves as the matrix language, while English fills the role of the embedded language.
In contrast, lexical borrowing is the incorporation of lexical items derived from one language, the donor language, into another, the recipient language (Myers-Scotton, 2006: 210f.). In the data analysed here, English acts as the donor language and Faroese as the recipient language.
There are two main types of borrowings: On the one hand, established loans, "which typically show full linguistic integration, native-language synonym displacement, and widespread diffusion, even among recipient-language monolinguals", and on the other the so-called ad-hoc or nonce-borrowings (Poplack, 1993: 265). As the latter presuppose active knowledge of a second language (L2) on the part of the speaker, they can be regarded as codeswitches, more precisely as insertions, which is how they will also be treated in this study (Poplack, 1993: 265;Muysken, 2000: 3, 5, 33, 64). Due to the status of ELF, the bilinguals' average English language proficiency is rather high, so that some scholars even postulate a gradual bilingualism among ELF-users (cf. Mesthrie, 2006). One result of this is that fewer and fewer borrowings tend to be assimilated to L1-pronunciation patterns, so that the boundaries between code-switching and borrowing are becoming increasingly blurred. This becomes particularly obvious in the domain of CMC, whose main characteristics will be outlined in the following section.

Computer-mediated communication
In the last two decades, the advent of the Internet and its influence on global communication has become a much researched object of study in a number of disciplines (Thurlow et al., 2004: 20;Bodomo, 2010: Xf., 1;Georgakopoulou, 2011: 93). Its revolutionary impact on cultural life in the Western hemisphere can be compared to that of other communication technologies in the history of mankind, such as the printing press or the telephone, and has ushered in what is often referred to as the Information Age or Knowledge Society (Thurlow et al., 2004: 26;Bodomo, 2010: XI, 1). Computer-mediated communication can be defined as "the coding and decoding of linguistic and other symbolic systems between sender and receiver for information processing in multiple formats through the medium of the computer and allied technologies […] and through media like the internet, email, chat systems, text messaging, YouTube, Skype, and many more to be invented" (Bodomo, 2010: 6).
Despite its multifaceted nature, a list of core-features of CMC can be drawn up with some confidence. These features are mostly based on the technical constraints and affordances of the production and reception conditions of the given technical framework(s) (cf. Clark and Brennan, 1991;Brennan and Lockridge, 2006). CMC thus tends to be multimodal (i.e. containing various forms of media), multicodal (i.e. containing different codes, such as symbols, icons, indices) and hypertextual (Thurlow et al., 2004: 33;Bodomo, 2010: 117f.). Furthermore, CMC is typically characterised by its asynchronicity or its quasi-synchronicity, meaning that the exchanges are either all subject to time lags, however short, or that only part of the interaction is synchronous, while others are asynchronous (Thurlow et al., 2004: 33;Bodomo, 2010: 117f.). Most notably, the boundaries between written and spoken language are fluid in CMC. Speaking in Koch and Oesterreicher's (1985;1994) terms, it is characterised by conceptional orality in a written medium (Thurlow et al., 2004: 124-126;Georgakopoulo, 2011: 94f.). Another widely observed property is the extensive use of multilingual resources, especially with regard to EWL (Bodomo, 2010: XII, 2, 13f.; but cf. also Thurlow et al., 2004 for linguistic diversity).
In order to explore the impact of EWL on Faroese in a CMC setting, a well-established form of communication within CMC (in German Kommunikationsform, cf. Dürscheid, 2005;also Herring, 2007), the discussion forum, was chosen to serve as a linguistic database. Such forums are generally marked by temporal asynchronicity 1 , their many-to-many participant structure, their social norms (also known as netiquette), as well as certain technical restrictions and affordances such as the possibility to use different codes (pictures, emoticons etc. besides language) and modes (embedding of e.g. video or audio files), or a function allowing users to directly quote other users. The different discussion threads are made up of individual user entries, comparable to turns in spoken conversations, which usually, but not necessarily refer to previous entries in the discussion thread at hand. Generally, some prior planning in terms of content and style of the entries can be expected, and the users also have the possibility to edit their entries in hindsight.
The present corpus was compiled from Kjak.org, an independent Faroese discussion forum. Subdivided into different subforums, it covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, society, sports, philosophy, cooking and entertainment. More precisely, the data was retrieved from the subforum Filmar, sendingar og telduspøl ('Films, TV shows and computer games'). In this collection of different discussion threads, users talk about products of popular culture as found in some of the most extensively consumed forms of mass-media entertainment. Since these can be said to be a stronghold of Western and particularly Anglophone culture and hence a supreme domain of EWL (Seidlhofer et al., 2006: 5), the English language can be expected to feature prominently in conversations revolving around popular culture conveyed by the mass media.
At the time of documentation, the subforum was comprised of 341 threads, which together were made up of 5158 individual entries, roughly spanning 4 years of user activity, amounting to roughly 580,000 tokens. From this database, 131 types and 942 tokens relevant to this study's purpose were extracted and analysed.
The entries on Kjak.org can be read by anyone with Internet access, so that the type of communication there can be clas-sified as public (as opposed to private or semi-private). On the other hand, posting on the forum requires prior registration. Thus, the users cannot remain completely anonymous, but are nevertheless free to create a user profile that does not need to match their identity in real life, but may instead include pseudonyms, fictitious avatars and locations etc. Perusing Kjak.org, and particularly the sub-forums analysed here, one gets the impression of a rather close-knit online community in which the users are fairly familiar with one another -a fact also reflected by a relaxed and colloquial tone of discourse characterised by a mixture of both conceptionally written and oral features.

e study
The basic research variables of this case study are modelled on those investigated in Sandøy and Petersen's (2007) and Simonsen and Sandøy's (2008) studies. But instead of covering nouns, adjectives and verbs, the present focus will lie exclusively on nouns, since these constitute a) the most commonly borrowed lexical category (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 446;Myers-Scotton, 2006: 210) and b) are most likely to be subject to a highly diverse and complex range of nativisation processes, whereas imported adjectives usually remain uninflected in Scandinavian languages, and verbs tend to be subject to regular integration patterns (Svavarsdóttir, 2007: 30f.).
Most of the lexemes in the present corpus are simplex lexemes, while compounds were only taken into account if their headwords were borrowed from English, not just their modifying elements.
Furthermore, proper names, be it of persons, computer games, TV shows, movies, countries etc. were not taken into account. The only exception was made for a small group of highly frequent and morphologically partly integrated product names, namely Mac, Macbook, Wii and Xbox. Furthermore, the name of the free encyclopaedia Wikipedia was included as well on grounds that will be explained later (chap. 5.1.2). Another rather problematic group, which was nevertheless included, is that of abbreviations, including both acronyms such as RAM and initialisms such as URL. Finally, a small group of internationalisms with orthographically partly nativised Danish variants was included due to the fact that their spelling often revealed them to be directly influenced by English orthographic norms.

Morphology
In order to fit in with the Faroese paradigm of nominal inflection, English nouns need to be integrated with respect to several morphologically marked grammatical categories, i.e. gender, number, case, all of which are structured according to several declension classes, and furthermore definiteness, with the enclitic definite article in turn inflecting for gender, number, and case.
The vast majority of tokens are evenly distributed among two categories, nativised (n = 445) and neutral (n = 401). The former comprises all the tokens which are overtly integrated into Faroese grammar by means of inflectional suffixes (cf. Simonsen and Sandøy, 2008: 52), e.g. Eng lish the snobs → Faroese snobbarnir. These make up 47% of the entire number of tokens. By contrast, neutral tokens are those which do not need any such overt inflectional modification in order to fit in with Faroese inflectional patterns (cf. Simonsen and Sandøy, 2008: 52). These include for example all indefinite M./F./N.Acc.Sg. forms, such as the following, since they are usually bare stems in Faroese as well: (1) Eg sendi eitt link 2 til hendan trádin 3 til Elding.
'The Ring' has a rating(F.Acc.Sg.) of 7, something.' (3) havi annars ein chip í mínari gomlu PS1 'by the way, I've got a chip(M.Acc.Sg.) in my old PS1' The number of non-nativised tokens, i.e. nouns that remain unchanged despite requiring the compulsory addition of inflectional morphemes to mark agreement in case, number and gender, is comparatively low (8%). The fact that the number of morphologically marked nouns is higher than that of neutral nouns stands in contrast to Simonsen and Sandøy's (2008: 60f.) findings: In their corpus compiled from newspapers, the number of neutral forms was twice as high as the number of those forms that were morphologically nativised. This could arguably be due to different media characteristics, especially with regard to normative pressure, which tends to be higher in traditional print media than in CMC. In the next chapters, a selection of findings will be discussed, starting with an analysis of the grammatical categories gender and number.

Gender
Typologically speaking, there are two major gender assignment systems. On the one hand, the so-called natural gender systems (Corbett, 1991: 9), i.e. semantic systems "where semantic factors are sufficient on their own account for assignment" (Corbett, 1991: 8), for example where males are referred to with masculine nouns and females with feminine nouns (cf. also Wagner, 2005: 222). This is what we find in the present-day standard varieties of English 5 , where gender manifests itself along a male/female divide, as well as an animacy scale (Baugh and Cable, 2002: 11;Wagner, 2005: 225, 233). While higher animals and humans are referred to with he, she and who, lower animals and inanimates are referred to with it and which 6 . Moreover, gender is generally a covert category in English, i.e. it is not formally encoded on the nouns themselves 7 . On the other hand, Faroese has the markings of formal gender assignment systems, i.e. systems in which "gender is determined to a large extent by formal criteria" (Wagner, 2005: 222). These criteria or rules are usually phonological or morphological (Wagner, 2005: 222).
In the analysed corpus, neuter is predominant among the types (n = 38) if the large group of agent nouns (as for instance English designer → Faroese designari(M.) is relativised 8 , reducing the total number of masculine types by 50% from n = 60 to n = 30 (cf. Fig. 2). This confirms Petersen's (2009: 89f., 112) assumption that neuter is the default gender at word-level, as well as his observation that it manifests itself particularly in the context of borrowing.
This finding may be regarded as further evidence for the precedence of the default neuter rule. Once more, some aspects of these findings are similar to those of Simonsen and Sandøy (2008: 60), who noted a significant affinity for strong neuter among imported nouns, most likely be- cause they require the least amount of morphological integration, so that many borrowed nouns can remain unchanged without violating Faroese grammar. The following sub-sections will give a detailed account of how some of the abovementioned gender assignment rules are at work in the present corpus.

Masculine nouns
As explained in the previous section, masculine nouns constitute the second largest group of types in the present corpus if the high number of agent nouns is relativised. In most instances, their gender could possibly be influenced by their Danish counterparts, as illustrated in the following: Blog is a common gender noun in Danish, so that it is equally likely to either become masculine or feminine in Faroese. Through out the present corpus, however, there is a clear tendency for Danish common gender nouns to be assigned masculine rather than feminine gender. The gender assignment in snob, which is either common gender or neuter in Danish, can be explained with reference to one of the central SAR in Faroese, which is "nouns denoting persons are masculine". According to the assignment hierarchy, SAR are most likely to override all the other rules, in this case either the default neuter rule or the PAR "monosyllabic nouns are neuter". Some nouns clearly violate the formal rule that no masculine noun in the nominative singular can have a zero-ending or a consonantal ending other than [l], [n], [ɹ] and be masculine (cf. also Petersen, 2009: 301), as witnessed by the following example: As the lexeme dude shows a great amount of morphological and orthographic variation throughout the corpus 9 , it may be classified as a code-switch rather than a borrowing. The user's decision to add the gender marker is based on the same motivation as the two previous examples, the word-level semantic rule "nouns denoting persons are masculine". In some cases, neither of these rules can be said to have a bearing on the user's gender assignment, as witnessed by the next token: (11) men tan fyrsti patch'urin er komin, og hjálpur uppá tað. 'but the first patch(M.Nom.Sg.) has been released and is clearing that up.' Patch is neither lexicalised in Den Danske Ordbog (Hjorth et al., 2013), nor is it covered by any semantic rule, so the motivation for this particular choice of gender is not readily deducible.

Neuter nouns
Relatively speaking, neuter nouns constitute the largest group of types in the present corpus. One particular sub-group whose gender assignment is solidly predictable is that of well-established monosyllabic loans that have also been assigned neuter gender in Danish. This is the case for link, which actually also has a phono- Apart from being monosyllabic (PAR) and arguably ranking low on the animacy hier-archy (SAR) and hence unlikely to receive masculine or feminine gender, ghost is also likely to have been assigned neuter gender as a result of semantic analogy: Faroese 'ghost', spøkilsi, is neuter as well. (16) Havi annars spaeld demoið og tað er heilt gott. 'By the way, I've played the demo (N.Acc.Sg.Def.) and it's really good.'

Feminine nouns
As an abbreviation of demonstration, demo is a common gender noun in Danish; on account of MAR "all Danish nouns ending on -sion/tion are common gender" (Petersen, 2009: 253f.). These would regularly become feminine in Faroese (Petersen, 2009: 253f.). However, <-o>=/o/ in the final position is a formal property that can also trigger neuter gender assignment as in foto 'photo(N.)' (Petersen, 2009: 254).
In this study, this potential assignment conflict was often resolved in favour of feminine gender, as most tokens on -o preserved the gender of the unabbreviated form of the respective lexeme (e.g. demonstratión(F.) → demo(F.)). Since Danish kit is neuter, and phonologically similar Faroese words like kitt 'putty(N.)', splitt 'discord(N.)' or spritt 'liquor(N.)' also fall into this gender class, another explanation needs to be found.
One could be the user's attempt to disambiguate kit from native kitt, although this seems rather unlikely in the given context. Alternatively, it could be interpreted as an instance of semantic analogy, which causes the gender of an already existing native lexeme to be transferred to a synonymous or otherwise semantically closely related lexeme, both native and non-native (Petersen, 2009: 104, 276; cf. also example (15) However, only few types in the present corpus have a clear-cut gender affiliation. In many cases, gender assignment seems to be rather unstable and thus open to adhoc negotiation, as will be shown in the next paragraph.

Indecisive gender assignment
Double gender is a phenomenon not only restricted to loanwords, but one that can and often does occur among native nouns as well (cf. Petersen, 2009: 255f.). In the present corpus, vacillating gender in English loans or code-switches constitutes the rule rather than the exception. This is the case because the tokens associated with most types show considerable variation in that respect, making it necessary to determine the "dominant" rather than the "absolute" gender for each type. At least in this particular segment of CMC, the aforementioned assignment rules and their hitherto observed hierarchy do not appear to act as fully reliable predicators for gender assignment. Sometimes, there is even intra-individual variation. The following entry was made by user "shooter": In answer to this, another user, "Polrw", writes: To which "shooter" replies: (23) Ja, mín batnaði eisini aftaná patchin, men tað kemur fyri viðhvørt tó. 'Yes, mine also improved after the patch(M.Acc.Sg.Def.), but that does happen occasionally.' User "shooter" starts out assigning neuter gender to patch, but then switches to masculine instead. A few exchanges later, however, he reverts to using neuter again: (24) So inntil víðari eri eg ikki glaður, men vónandi fara patchini at gera tað søtari. 'So for the time being I am not happy, but hopefully the patches(N.Nom.Pl. Def.) will make it better.' A third user had opted for feminine (patch'ina(F.Acc.Sg.Def.)) gender instead. From this, it becomes obvious how inherent features such as gender are sometimes negotiated on the spot and subject to interspeaker convergence, the process in which a language user consciously or subconsciously attunes their linguistic behaviour to that of their interlocutor(s) (cf. Giles et al., 1991). Actually, there is strong evidence that variation according to the user appears to be yet another variable that needs to be factored into gender assignment. Considering the fact that patch is a code-switch rather than a loanword, this gender instability becomes a bit more understandable. Most of the nouns discussed so far can be categorised as belonging to strong inflectional classes. Their weak counterparts will be discussed in the next section.

Weak nouns
One of the most striking results of this study is the scarcity of weak-class nouns as opposed to the strong nouns discussed so far, i.e. masculine class 5 nouns ending on -i such as granni 'neighbour(M.)' (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 81f.), feminine class 5 nouns on -a following the paradigm of e.g. tunga 'tongue(F.)' (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 89f.), and neuter class 3 nouns ending on -a like eyga 'eye(N.)' (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 85). The only exception includes agent or instrument nouns on -ari which fall into the weak masculine declension class 5 (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 81f.). The fact that the weak declension paradigms are the most regular ones begs the question as to why only a small number of loans were converted into these classes, as can be seen below: In some cases, the loan already exhibits a suitable formal feature in its original form, i.e. it ends on -a (F./N.) as in Wikipedia or -i (M./N.). This feature has been reanalysed in (25) as the declension class marker of a weak feminine class 5 noun, which regularly becomes -u in the accusative and dative singular (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 89f.). Conversely, the author of (25) could have categorised Wikipedia as a neuter class 3 noun whose declension marker is -a for all cases in the singular (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 85). By contrast, (26) and (27) do not have any such formal trait at first glance. However, according to one PAR, common gender nouns ending on <-e> in Danish such as adresse 'address(U.)' are regularly converted to class 5 feminine nouns, i.e. adressa 'address(F.)', or as in (27) Danish kode 'code(U.)' → Faroese kota 'code(F.)' (Petersen, 2009: 253f.). Sketch (26), on the other hand, does not bear any formal resemblance to class 5 weak nouns. The biggest group of weak nouns in this corpus is that of agent or instrument nouns, which ties in with the findings from previous studies on recent loans (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 447). In English, these are derived from verbs by affixing the morpheme -(e)r as in to compute → computer, to rock → rocker. Their Faroese equivalents are formed with the derivational suffix -ari and belong to the weak masculine class 5 (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 82;Petersen, 2009: 235 Apart from those regularly integrated agent nouns, there is a group of lexemes which can be referred to as morphological pseudo-Anglicisms, because their derivation is not a native process, but rather one that only takes place once the original English lexeme has been imported into the recipient language. In other words, pseudo-Anglicisms denote lexical material which is transferred from English into another language and used in a non-native way (Koll-Stobbe, 2009: 25f. Finally, hippie appears to have been given similar treatment. All in all, this tendency to create agent nouns from semantically suitable English loans seems to be a phenomenon worthy of further research. It could be the generalisation of a SAR, since prototypically, -ari nouns denote persons, so -ari may be overgeneralised as a suffix for English borrowings with the semantic feature PERSON. Something similar also has been observed in Icelandic by Svavarsdóttir (2007: 38) for English hit → Icelandic hittari.

Number
In Simonsen and Sandøy's study (2008: 61), the percentage of native plural forms (58%) is lower than the results found in this study (78%). However, it needs to be pointed out that this comparison is rather tenuous on account of the considerably lower number of pluralic tokens in their corpus: 26 vs. 170 in the present one (cf. Fig. 3). The largest part of the plural morphemes suffixed to English nouns in the present corpus are Faroese ones, while roughly a fourth agrees with English pluralic -(e)s, as illustrated by the following examples: The two code-switches in (36)   pheme at all. However, it could be argued that they have actually been accorded a zero morph in the nominative or accusative plural, marking them as neuter nouns as illustrated in the following two examples: ( While the zero plural is a regular allomorph for neuter nouns, it is unusual for masculine and feminine nouns. Sandøy and Petersen (2007: 61) observed that some of the participants in their survey seemed to use this paradigm for lexemes like airbag. In the present study, only two tokens clearly fitting this pattern could be found -an unmarked masculine and a feminine plural, one an initialism, the other a product name: With a total of 47 tokens, -ar is by far the most commonly used plural-suffix in this corpus (cf. Fig. 4). It is followed by the zero morph -Ø with 33 instances, 18 of them clearly marking neuter nouns, while only three of the remaining ones could be categorised as masculine or feminine. In third and fourth place are -ir and -ur, with 15 and eight tokens respectively, both of them dominantly marking feminine lexemes.
In his statistical analysis of native language material, Petersen (2009: 209) had previously arrived at a more or less identical distribution.

Unexpected patterns
Since regional variation is a characteristic feature of modern Faroese, with several dialects dotted around the country's numerous isles (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 339f.), and due to the lack of an official spoken standard, it is not surprising to find instances of spoken Faroese transferred to its written form in CMC. This can be seen in the plural allo morphs of agent nouns. There is a clear split between spoken and written usage: Whilst the written standard only allows -ar for marking the plural of agent nouns on -ari, most Faroese use the allomorph -ir when speaking. However, as spoken and written language are not independent, but rather interdependent, properties from one may well cross over to another and vice versa. In the following examples, the non-standard, oral allomorph -ir replaces the standard -ar, illustrating the closeness of CMC to spoken usage.

Vocalic and consonantal integration
Overall, orthographic integration occurs much less frequently than morphological nativisation in the present corpus, and it does so with a much higher degree of variation. As illustrated in Fig. 5, 63% (n = 598) remain unchanged, despite violating Faroese orthographic norms, 15% (n = 142) are neutral, and only the remaining 21% (n = 202) show signs of adaptation in their spelling. Once more, this ties in with Simonsen and Sandøy's (2008: 73) observations. Actual orthophone integration is very rare, and most tokens are only partly adapted to Faroese orthographic norms. The findings also confirm Jóansson's (1997: 39) observation that most of the recent loans are not naturalised, at least orthographically, and even less of them are codified, despite their fairly common currency.
However, English <c>/k/ is sometimes replaced with Faroese <k>/k/ (as in (48)), while English <c>/s/ is substituted with the orthophone native <s>/s/ (as in (49)). In (50), the grapheme <c> is exchanged for <k> since <c> is not part of the Faroese alphabet (Poulsen et al., 1998 In (51), the palatoalveolar affricate /tʃ/, which both languages have in common, and which in the English lexeme is realised graphemically as <ch>, is replaced by the native grapheme combination <tj>, as in tjaldur or fitjing.
(51) har eru 5 sketjir tilsamans 'Here are altogether 5 sketches.' (52) Robert Downey jr. dugir eisini sítt sjitt 12 . 'Robert Downey, Jr. also knows his shit.' In (52), the English grapheme-morpheme correspondence <sh>/ʃ/ is replaced with Faroese <sj>/ʃ/. In word-initial position preceding <i>/i/, it is actually very rare and can only be found in other integrated loans such as <sjimpansa> 'chimpanzee' or <sji-itur> 'Shiite'. The unmarked rendition would be <sk> as in <skinn> 'skin', <skip> 'ship' etc. Possibly, this spelling was chosen in order to avoid confusion with Faroese <skit>/<skittur> 'dirt, excrement, shit' and thus to achieve semantic differentiation. In addition, this token has undergone a gemination of final <t> to <tt> in order to satisfy the syllable quantity rule 13 and to represent / h tː/. Vowel adaptation is far less common than its consonantal counterpart. This may be explained by the fact that a) vowel quality is generally more difficult to pinpoint than consonant quality and b) vowel quantity is usually established through the quantity of the adjacent consonants (cf. Simonsen and Sandøy, 2008: 67-70). However, we still find some instances of vocalic integration.
(53) Tað var annars forrita av bara tveimum dúdum (fyri tað mesta). 'Incidentally, it was programmed by just two dudes (for the most part).' In this case, British English dude /djuːd/ or American English /duːd/ becomes Faroese /tʉuːt/. Considering that in stressed syllables, vowel graphemes followed by a single consonantal grapheme usually correspond to a long vowel phoneme in Faroese, any change in the particular marking of length is strictly speaking not necessary, as Faroese <dud> would be suitable to represent /tuːt/. Therefore, this spelling could be seen to indicate the British rather than the American English pronunciation, since Faroese <ú>/ʉuː/ is very similar to British English <u>/juː/.
(54) Hey nørdar. 'Hey nerds.' In 1985, the American English loanword nerd was changed to <nørd> in Danish (Jarvad, 2008:  Another sound change engendered by the indirect import of a lexeme via Danish can be seen in the example above. The original English diphthong /eɪ/ has been replaced by a long monophthong /eː/. This substitution can also be found in Danish, where it is also graphemically represented as <ae>/e̞ ː/ in traener. (56) Tað maer dámar best við seriuni er hvussu alt hongur saman hjá nøkrum redneck rúmdarkovboyarum.
'What I like best about the series is how everything is about some redneck spacecowboys.' In this codified variant spelling of English cowboy as <kovboy>, the English diphthong /aʊ/ is segmented into the vowelconsonant combination <ov>/ɔv/, making it technically both a vocalic and a consonantal adaptation. Most vocalic integrations, however, are of a purely graphemic nature. Many diphthongs in English are represented graphemically in a discontinuous manner by means of a final silent but non-deletable <e>. This is illustrated by minimal-pairs such as <tap>[t h aep] vs. <tape>[t h eɪp] or <win>[wɪn] vs. <wine> [waɪn]. Discontinuous in this context means that the wordfinal grapheme <e> is always separated by an intervening consonant from the vocalic grapheme, together with which it represents the diphthong, i.e. <VCV>. Since this graphonotactic feature has no equivalent in Faroese, it is very often dispensed with, as in: (57) er tad ikki ein av teimum grovu jokunum 'isn't that one of those crude jokes' (58) Hvar eru bestu producarar, bestu instrumentalistar, komponistur 'Where are [the] best producers, [the] best instrumentalists, composers' By deleting the silent <e>, the language user also avoids the inadvertent creation of a graphemic hiatus, i.e. <producearar>. In English, the removal of <e> in <produce-> before <-arar> would cause <c> to be pronounced /k/ instead of /s/ in (58). However, in this particular context, this orthographic modification by a non-native user of English is supposedly of no consequence with regard to the actual pronunciation of the lexeme.
In his sociolinguistic survey of attitudes towards and use of direct and indirect loanwords in Faroese, Jacobsen (2012: 214f.) also examines the acceptance of such nativised alternatives, including <kovboy> 'cowboy', <tineygjari> 'teen -ager' and <Kili> 'Chile' (to which the vege table owes its name). In this study, it was shown that nearly two thirds of the respondents rejected <kovboy> and <Kili>, and almost every interviewee disapproved of <tineygjari> (Jacobsen, 2012: 216). Since the normative pressure of language ideology is arguably lower in the conceptionally oral medium of CMC than in other written media, it is not surprising that we do not find these disfavoured nativised variants here, but rather their non-puristic, unadapted counterparts 15 .
In some instances, foreign language material is marked as such with the help of single or double quotation marks as exemplified below (cf. also Meisenburg, 1992 A striking orthographic feature is the rather frequent insertion of an apostrophe <'>, less often a hyphen <->, to demarcate the boundary between the non-native nominal stem and the native affixed inflectional morphemes. One group of lexical items that is particularly prone to such a treatment is that of abbreviations, or more precisely, initialisms, as illustrated below: In all these instances, the apostrophe could be regarded as an orthographic hiatus-filler breaking up marked vowel combinations. The apostrophe is also inserted in cases of a purely graphemic and not phonological hiatus between morpheme boundaries, more precisely a silent final <e>: (70) Tann obligatoriska Tarantino joke'in/ dialogin var genial... 'That compulsory Tarantino joke/dialogue was genius…' (71) Rate'ingarnar eru høgar eisini.
'The ratings are also high.' Example (71) deserves special attention since its author has reanalysed the original language material in a way which effectively marks it as non-native. The expected and standard language form, i.e. the gerund of rate would be <rating>. Generally, the stem loses the final <e> if the morpheme -ing is suffixed 17 . However, the author preserves the <e> before the -ing and instead inserts an apostrophe to mark the morpheme boundary. It could be that the deverbal -ing-suffix to derive action nouns is treated as a Faroese morpheme here, since it is the same in both languages. Thus, the derivational process here is marked as a Faroese, not an English one. Finally, there is a large number of words in which neither the phonological nor the orthographic make-up seem to necessitate any additional boundary demar-cation, as they neither end on phonological nor purely orthographic vowels. There are two possible explanations for this strategy: On the one hand, it could simply be that the user wishes to flag the non-native language material as such, perhaps because they feel insecure about the "right" way of morphologically integrating an apparently "wrong" lexeme. (Subconscious) notions of purism may again play a role here.
On the other hand, the apostrophes or hyphens may actually be used to enhance readability and hence comprehensibility by "protecting" the morpheme boundary against potentially disruptive syllabication.

<ð> as orthographic hiatus-breaker
One of the better known idiosyncrasies of the highly etymological writing system which was developed for Faroese during the National Romantic Period is the fact that the grapheme <ð> in most cases has no phonetic counterpart (Lindqvist, 2003: 135f.). In word-final position, it is completely silent and in some cases, like <tað>=[tʰɛaː] 'this(N.Nom./Acc.Sg.)', also deletable 18 (Lindqvist, 2001: 61f.), whilst elsewhere, it leads to a qualitative and quantitative change in the preceding vowel such as in <góðs>=[koesː] 'goods', or it can also be realised as [k] in front of [ɹ] as in <veðrið> [ˈvɛkɹɪ]. This mismatch between graphemic representation and actual pronunciation is a common error source, both for native and non-native users of Faroese alike.
However, if <ð> occurs between two vowels, it is not silent, but nevertheless deletable (Lindqvist, 2001: 61f.) as shown in <frøði>[-jɪ] and <frøi> [-jɪ]. In this position, the resulting hiatus is filled with an epenthetic [j], [v] or [w] in accordance with a set of complementary distribution rules (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 38f.). The present data contains some intriguing examples which may provide an insight into the actual synchronic status of <ð>. Sg.)' is entirely unmotivated. As this grapheme a) does not exist in English and b) has no straightforward phonemic equivalent in Faroese, it can be concluded that its insertion in this and the other cases listed above is purely orthographic in na-ture. In other words, the intervocalic <ð> has been reanalysed synchronically as the default grapheme representing the hiatusbreaking phonemes /j; v; w/. This appears to have happened at the expense of its diachronic base. Since it apparently lacks an underlying phoneme 19 , its only purpose seems to be the graphemic representation of hiatus-breaking epenthe tic consonants in spoken Faroese. And this is exactly how it is used in this corpus. The same strategy was employed in certain internationalisms with a comparable phonological make-up. Most importantly, these findings close an alleged gap that was discovered by Simonsen and Sandøy (2008: 60f.) when they reported that they could not find any instance of bingo 'bingo' with a suffixed morpheme, e.g. <bingoið> 'bingo(N.Nom. /Acc.Sg.Def.)' in the Føroyamálsdeildin corpus, despite the fact that inflected forms can be occasionally heard in spoken usage and are even listed in the current online edition of Orðabókagrunnurin's Faroese dictionary (Poulsen et al., 1998(Poulsen et al., /2016. Instead, the neuter nouns ending on unstressed <-o> only appeared in their bare, i.e. uninflected form. By contrast, the results of the present study indicate that it was most likely normative pressure that may have prevented the users from suffixing the adequate morphemes to these lexemes. In CMC, this pressure is mostly absent, and thus the users are more likely to devise creative ad-hoc solutions for this problem. Thus, they bridge the gap between a fully-fledged inflectional paradigm in spoken and an apparently defective one in written usage.
All in all, morphological adaptation occurs much more frequently in this corpus than orthographic integration. That is to say, while nouns are often clearly assigned inflectional elements marking number, case and gender, orthographic integration is rather the exception than the norm, and is often only implemented partially.
Approximately one fourth of all tokens in this study have been integrated into Faroese morphology without having undergone any change in their graphemic form.

Conclusion
Contrary to Simonsen and Sandøy's (2008: 60f.) observation that certain "problematic" lexemes, particularly in terms of their word-final phonological and/or graphemic make-up (bingo, interface), appear to resist inflection in written Faroese, this study provides ample proof that, at least in the context of CMC, morphological integration is the rule rather than the exception. Overall, Faroese language use in CMC is marked by a high density of English borrowings and code-switches, as well as a high degree of creative solutions to various conflicts occurring at the morphological, phonological and orthographic interface between Faroese and English. Instead of avoiding integration and thus leaving the non-native language material fully uninflected and orthographically unadapted, the language users on Kjak.org generally tend to apply at least morphological modifications in line with their native Faroese grammar. By combining the morphological and orthographic variables discussed in this paper -inflectional suffixes and consonantal and/or vocalic graphemes -we arrive at different degrees of integration along a continuous scale which can be illustrated as follows:  Def.)). The morphemic boundaries between the non-native content and the native grammatical morphemes are immediately visible. At the next stage, the language users dispense with such markers, integrating the morphemes more or less seamlessly (demoið(N.Nom./Acc.Sg. Def.)), sometimes by making minor orthographic adjustments (e.g. deleting the stem-final -e in the case of dude+urin → dudurin (M.Nom.Sg.Def.)). In a final step, some users employ decidedly native graphemes in order to achieve a maximum degree of orthographic integration in addition to the morphological adaptation (dúdum(M.Dat.Pl.)). In the case of "intrusive <ð>" in demoðina(F.Acc.Sg.Def.), the users simultaneously enhance morphological integration in a "genuinely Faroese" manner. In the present corpus, stages two (morphological integration with the help of punctuation marks as morphemic boundary markers) and three (seamless morphological integration both with and without regard to Faroese graphotactics) are the most common. Of course, codeswitched or borrowed lexemes do not necessarily have to follow this progression from one end of the scale to the other. Some do not advance further than the first or second step, others immediately enter on e.g. the third step and stay there. However, in the process of a code-switch obtaining its "full-time job" as an established loanword (cf. Myers-Scotton, 1989: 340), it tends to follow a trajectory of increasing integration from top to bottom, with morphological nativisation usually preceding orthographic nativisation. Based on these findings, it can be argued that the inhibition to combine native and non-native language material in one lexeme is considerably lower in CMC than in other written types of text (newspaper articles, classified ads, literature) researched in previous studies 20 . The members of the Faroese online community are facing the challenging task of negotiating language use and subsequently notions of identity amidst the forces of purism and accelerating globalisation in what is technically a trilingual communication setting (Knudsen, 2010: 136). Jóansson (1997: 202) remarks that a number of recent, nonnativised English borrowings are in all likelihood indirect loans that have entered Faroese via Danish. Jacobsen (2012: 200f.) also found that his Faroese respondents regarded the Danes' relationship towards English loanwords to be the least purist and most relaxed in comparison with the rest of the Nordic speech communities, i.e. the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Not only do the Faroese interviewees think that the Danes hardly ever translate or replace lexemes borrowed from English, but they also judge their own language awareness to rank highest among their Nordic neighbours (Jacobsen, 2012: 201). This is of interest for the present study in so far as it further corroborates the important role Danish appears to have played as a mediating language between English and Faroese. If the Danish speech community is perceived to be highly Anglophile by the Faroese, it can be inferred that one major indirect point of access to the English language is through Danish, as encountered by the Faroese, i.e. on TV, in cinemas, on the Internet, and not least through personal contact 21 . Several observations presented here -particularly regarding gender assignment and a number of spelling variants -indicate the considerable bearing the Danish language seems to have had on the integration process of English loanwords in Faroese. However, it could also be argued that over the past twenty years, the direct influence from English has been steadily increasing at the expense of Danish, particularly due to the growing importance of the Internet.
Finally, another key element for interpreting the findings presented here appears to be language ideology or rather a more relaxed approach to linguistic purism in the context of CMC. Purist ideology has a tradition that goes back over more than one century in Faroese, actuating around 1890 (Jacobsen, 2012: 259). Albeit moderate in comparison to similar Icelandic endeavours, Faroese efforts to replace foreign language material with appropriate native counterparts have had a discernible impact on codified works such as dictionaries and textbooks (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 452f.). On top of that, the Faroese málnevnd ('language committee') provides guidance and advice in linguistic questions (Thráinsson et al., 2004: 452f.). Nevertheless, the importance of purism has been on the wane for the last 30 years, especially among the younger, more educated generation, which is most likely to associate purist attitudes with lower social status (Jacobsen, 2012: 261f.). As witnessed by earlier studies, high normative pressure seems to discourage integration, leaving non-native language material grammatically stranded and sticking out like a sore thumb in traditional written media. By contrast, in the less strictly monitored context of CMC, this purism-induced unease appears to be overruled by a straightforward need for linguistic functionality (cf. also Petersen, 2006: 16-19). Arguably, this is in part the result of Kjak.org's pervasive user-pseudonymity and their relaxed and informal tone of communication.
Rather than leading to the often decried "simplification and decay" of the mother-tongue, the emergent grammatical and orthographic patterns described here, such as the introduction of morphological boundary markers, can be said to introduce a new layer of functional linguistic complexity. Thus, this unregulated "Faroeisation from below" may be considered to be less of an actual threat to the linguistic vitality of Faroese than the institutionalised purist agenda imposed from above, whose restrictive outlook on direct loan integration may even be deemed detrimental to its own self-proclaimed aim of keeping the language alive.