Icelandic language

Icelandic
íslenska
Pronunciation	[ˈistlɛnska]
Native to	Iceland
Ethnicity	Icelanders
Native speakers	(undated figure of 330,000)
Language family	Indo-European Germanic North Germanic West Scandinavian Insular Scandinavian Icelandic
Early forms	Old Norse Old West Norse Old Icelandic
Writing system	Latin(Icelandic alphabet) Icelandic Braille
Official status
Official language in	Iceland Nordic Council
Regulated by	Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
Language codes
ISO 639-1	is
ISO 639-2	ice(B) isl(T)
ISO 639-3	isl
Glottolog	icel1247
Linguasphere	52-AAA-aa
Geographic distribution of the Icelandic language

Icelandic(/aɪsˈlændɪk/eyess-LAN-dik;endonym:íslenska,pronounced[ˈistlɛnska]) is aNorth Germanic languagefrom theIndo-European language familyspoken by about 314,000 people, the vast majority of whom live inIceland,where it is the national language.Since it is aWest Scandinavian language,it is most closely related toFaroese,westernNorwegian dialects,and theextinct languageNorn.It is not mutually intelligible with the continental Scandinavian languages (Danish,Norwegian,andSwedish) and is more distinct from the most widely spoken Germanic languages,EnglishandGerman.The written forms of Icelandic and Faroese are very similar, but their spoken forms are notmutually intelligible.

The language is moreconservativethan most other Germanic languages. While most of them have greatly reduced levels ofinflection(particularly noundeclension), Icelandic retains a four-casesyntheticgrammar (comparable toGerman,though considerably more conservative and synthetic) and is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Icelandic vocabulary is also deeply conservative, with the country'slanguage regulatormaintaining an active policy of coining terms based on older Icelandic words rather than directly taking inloanwordsfrom other languages.

Aside from the 300,000 Icelandic speakers in Iceland, Icelandic is spoken by about 8,000 people in Denmark,5,000 people in the United States,and more than 1,400 people in Canada,notably in the region known asNew IcelandinManitobawhich was settled by Icelanders beginning in the 1880s.

The state-fundedÁrni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studiesserves as a centre for preserving the medieval Icelandic manuscripts and studying the language and its literature. The Icelandic Language Council, comprising representatives of universities, the arts, journalists, teachers, and theMinistry of Culture, Science and Education,advises the authorities onlanguage policy.Since 1995, on 16 November each year, the birthday of 19th-century poetJónas Hallgrímssonis celebrated asIcelandic Language Day.

Classification

See also:Germanic languages

Icelandic is anIndo-European languageand belongs to theNorth Germanicgroup of theGermanic languages.Icelandic is further classified as a West Scandinavian language.Icelandic is derived from an earlier languageOld Norse,which later becameOld Icelandicand currently Modern Icelandic. The division between old and modern Icelandic is said to be before and after 1540.

Proto-Germanic	East Germanic languages West Germanic languages Proto-Norse→ Old Norse Old West Norse Icelandic Faroese Norwegian Old East Norse Danish Swedish

History

Main article:History of Icelandic

A page from theLandnámabók,an early Icelandic manuscript

The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD. Many of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved orally. The most famous of the texts, which were written inIcelandfrom the 12th century onward, are thesagas of Icelanders,which encompass the historical works and thePoetic Edda.

The language of the sagas isOld Icelandic,a western dialect ofOld Norse.TheDano-Norwegian,then later Danish rule of Iceland from 1536 to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic (in contrast to the Norwegian language), which remained in daily use among the general population. Though more archaic than the other living Germanic languages, Icelandic changed markedly in pronunciation from the 12th to the 16th century, especially in vowels (in particular,á,æ,au,andy/ý). The letters -ý & -y lost their original meaning and merged with -í & -i in the period 1400 - 1600. Around the same time or a little earlier the letter -æ originally signifying a simple vowel, a type of open -e, formed into the double vowel -ai, a double vowel absent in the original Icelandic.

The modernIcelandic alphabethas developed from a standard established in the 19th century, primarily by the Danish linguistRasmus Rask.It is based strongly on anorthographylaid out in the early 12th century by a document referred to as theFirst Grammatical Treatiseby an anonymous author, who has later been referred to as the First Grammarian. The later Rasmus Rask standard was a re-creation of the old treatise, with some changes to fit concurrentGermanicconventions, such as the exclusive use ofkrather thanc.Various archaic features, as the letterð,had not been used much in later centuries. Rask's standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th-century changes include the use oféinstead ofjeand the replacement ofzwithsin 1974.

Apart from the addition of new vocabulary, written Icelandic has not changed substantially since the 11th century, when the first texts were written onvellum.Modern speakers can understand the original sagas andEddaswhich were written about eight hundred years ago. The sagas are usually read with updated modern spelling and footnotes, but otherwise are intact (as with recent English editions ofShakespeare'sworks). With some effort, many Icelanders can also understand the original manuscripts.

Legal status and recognition

According to an act passed by theParliamentin 2011, Icelandic is "the national language of the Icelandic people and the official language in Iceland"; moreover, "[p]ublic authorities shall ensure that its use is possible in all areas of Icelandic society".

Iceland is a member of theNordic Council,a forum for co-operation between the Nordic countries, but the council uses only Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish as its working languages (although the council does publish material in Icelandic).Under theNordic Language Convention,since 1987 Icelandic citizens have had the right to use Icelandic when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries, without becoming liable for any interpretation or translation costs. The convention covers visits to hospitals, job centres, the police, and social security offices.It does not have much effect since it is not very well known and because those Icelanders not proficient in the other Scandinavian languages often have a sufficient grasp of English to communicate with institutions in that language (although there is evidence that the general English skills of Icelanders have been somewhat overestimated).The Nordic countries have committed to providing services in various languages to each other's citizens, but this does not amount to any absolute rights being granted, except as regards criminal and court matters.

Phonology

Main article:Icelandic phonology

Consonants

All Icelandicstopsare voiceless and are distinguished as such byaspiration.Stops are realised post-aspirated when at the beginning of the word, but pre-aspirated when occurring within a word.

Consonant phones

		Labial		Coronal		Palatal		Velar		Glottal
Nasal		(m̥)	m	(n̥)	n	(ɲ̊)	(ɲ)	(ŋ̊)	(ŋ)
Stop		pʰ	p	tʰ	t	(cʰ)	(c)	kʰ	k
Continuant	sibilant			s
	non-sibilant	f	v	θ	ð	(ç)	j	(x)	(ɣ)	h
Lateral				(l̥)	l
vibrant				(r̥)	r

• /n̥ntʰt/are laminaldenti-alveolar,/s/is apical alveolar,/θð/are alveolar non-sibilant fricatives; the former islaminal,while the latter is usuallyapical.
• A phonetic analysis reveals that the voiceless lateral approximant[l̥]is, in practice, usually realised with considerable friction, especially word-finally or syllable-finally, i. e., essentially as avoiceless alveolar lateral fricative[ɬ].

Scholten (2000,p. 22) includes three extra phones:[ʔl̥ˠlˠ].

Word-final voiced consonants are devoiced pre-pausally, so thatdag('day (acc.)') is pronounced as[ˈtaːx]anddagur('day (nom.)') is pronounced[ˈtaːɣʏr̥].

Vowels

Vowel chart of the 8 monophthongs

Icelandic has 8 monophthongs and 5 diphthongs.The diphthongs are created by taking a monophthong and adding either/i/or/u/to it.All the vowels can either be long or short; vowels in open syllables are long, and vowels in closed syllables are short.

Monophthongs

	Front		Back
	plain	round
Close	i		u
Near-close	ɪ	ʏ
Open-mid	ɛ	œ	ɔ
Open	a

Diphthongs

	Front offglide	Back offglide
Mid	ei•œi[œy]	ou
Open	ai	au

Grammar

Main article:Icelandic grammar

Photograph taken from page 176 ofColloquial Icelandic

Icelandic retains many grammatical features of other ancientGermanic languages,and resemblesOld Norwegianbefore much of itsfusionalinflection was lost. Modern Icelandic is still a heavilyinflected languagewith fourcases:nominative,accusative,dativeandgenitive.Icelandic nouns can have one of threegrammatical genders:masculine, feminine or neuter. There are two main declension paradigms for each gender:strongandweak nouns,and these are further divided into subclasses of nouns, based primarily on thegenitive singularandnominative pluralendings of a particular noun. For example, within the strong masculine nouns, there is a subclass (class 1) that declines with-s(hests) in the genitive singular and-ar(hestar) in the nominative plural. However, there is another subclass (class 3) of strong masculine nouns that always declines with-ar(hlutar) in the genitive singular and-ir(hlutir) in the nominative plural. Additionally, Icelandic permits aquirky subject,that is, certain verbs have subjects in an oblique case (i.e. other than the nominative).

Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in the four cases and for number in the singular and plural.

Verbsareconjugatedfortense,mood,person,numberandvoice.There are three voices: active, passive and middle (or medial), but it may be debated whether the middle voice is a voice or simply an independent class of verbs of its own, as every middle-voice verb has an active-voice ancestor, but sometimes with drastically different meaning, and the middle-voice verbs form a conjugation group of their own. Examples arekoma( "come" ) vs.komast( "get there" ),drepa( "kill" ) vs.drepast( "perish ignominiously" ) andtaka( "take" ) vs.takast( "manage to" ). In each of these examples, the meaning has been so altered, that one can hardly see them as the same verb in different voices. Verbs have up to ten tenses, but Icelandic, like English, forms most of them withauxiliary verbs.There are three or four main groups of weak verbs in Icelandic, depending on whether one takes a historical or a formalistic view:-a,-i,and-ur,referring to the endings that these verbs take when conjugated in the first personsingularpresent. Almost all Icelandic verbs have the ending -a in the infinitive, some withá,two withu(munu,skulu) one witho(þvo:"wash" ) and one withe.Many transitive verbs (i.e. they require anobject), can take areflexive pronouninstead. The case of the pronoun depends on the case that the verb governs. As for further classification of verbs, Icelandic behaves much like other Germanic languages, with a main division between weak verbs and strong, and the strong verbs, of which there are about 150 to 200, are divided into six classes plus reduplicative verbs.

The basic word order in Icelandic issubject–verb–object.However, as words are heavily inflected, the word order is fairly flexible, and every combination may occur in poetry; SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS are all allowed for metrical purposes. However, as with most Germanic languages, Icelandic usually complies with theV2 word orderrestriction, so the conjugated verb in Icelandic usually appears as the second element in the clause, preceded by the word or phrase being emphasised. For example:

• Ég veit það ekki.(Iknow it not.)
• Ekki veit ég það.(Notknow I it.)
• Það veit ég ekki.(Itknow I not.)
• Ég fór til Bretlands þegar ég var eins árs.(I went to Britain when I was one year old.)
• Til Bretlands fór ég þegar ég var eins árs.(To Britain went I, when I was one year old.)
• Þegar ég var eins árs fór ég til Bretlands.(When I was one year old, went I to Britain.)

In the above examples, the conjugated verbsveitandfórare always the second element in their respective clauses, seeverb-second word order.

A distinction between formal and informal address (T–V distinction) had existed in Icelandic from the 17th century, but use of the formal variant weakened in the 1950s and rapidly disappeared.It no longer exists in regular speech, but may occasionally be found in pre-written speeches addressed to thebishopand members ofparliament.

Vocabulary

Main articles:Icelandic vocabularyandIcelandic name

A simple family tree showing the Icelandic patronymic naming system.

Eyjafjallajökull,one of the smaller ice caps of Iceland, situated to the north ofSkógarand to the west ofMýrdalsjökull,is Icelandic for "glacier ofEyjafjöll",in turn" glacier of island mountains ".

Early Icelandic vocabulary was largelyOld Norsewith a few words being Celtic from when Celts first settled in Iceland.Theintroduction of Christianity to Icelandin the 11th centurybrought with it a need to describe newreligious concepts.The majority of new words were taken from otherScandinavian languages;kirkja( "church" ), for example. Numerous other languages have influenced Icelandic:Frenchbrought many words related to the court and knightship; words in thesemantic fieldof trade and commerce have been borrowed fromLow Germanbecause of trade connections. In the late 18th century,language purismbegan to gain noticeable ground in Iceland and since the early 19th century it has been the linguistic policy of the country (seelinguistic purism in Icelandic).Nowadays, it is common practice tocoinnew compound words from Icelandic derivatives.

Icelandic personal namesarepatronymic(and sometimesmatronymic) in that they reflect the immediate father or mother of the child and not the historic family lineage. This system, which was formerly used throughout the Nordic area and beyond, differs from mostWesternsystems offamily name.In most Icelandic families, the ancient tradition of patronymics is still in use; i.e. a person uses their father's name (usually) or mother's name (increasingly in recent years) in the genitive form followed by the morpheme -son ( "son" ) or -dóttir ( "daughter" ) in lieu of family names.

In 2019, changes were announced to the laws governing names. Icelanders who are officially registered withnon-binary genderwill be permitted to use the suffix-bur( "child of" ) instead of-sonor-dóttir.

Language policy

A core theme of Icelandic language ideologies is grammatical, orthographic and lexical purism for Icelandic. This is evident in general language discourses, in polls, and in other investigations into Icelandic language attitudes.The general consensus on Icelandic language policy has come to mean that language policy and language ideology discourse are not predominantly state or elite driven; but rather, remain the concern of lay people and the general public.The Icelandic speech community is perceived to have a protectionist language culture,however, this is deep-rooted ideologically primarily in relation to the forms of the language, while Icelanders in general seem to be more pragmatic as to domains of language use.

Linguistic purism

Main article:Linguistic purism in Icelandic

Starting in the late 16th century discussion has been ongoing on the purity of the Icelandic language, the bishop Oddur Einarsson wrote in 1589 that the language has remained unspoiled since the time the ancient literature of Iceland was written.Later in the 18th century the purism movement got bigger and more works were translated into Icelandic, especially in areas where Icelandic had hardly ever been used in, with this came manyneologisms,with many of them being loan-translations.In the early 19th century people were influenced byromanticismand a bigger importance was put on the purity of spoken language, instead of just the written language. The written language was also brought closer to the spoken language as the sentence structure of literature had previously been influenced byDanishandGerman.

The changes brought by the purism movement have had the most influence on the written language, as many speakers use foreign words freely in speech, but try to avoid them when writing. The success of the many neologisms created from the movement has also been variable as some loanwords have not been replaced with native ones.There is still a conscious effort to create new words, especially for science and technology, with many societies publishing dictionaries, some with the help of The Icelandic Language Committee (Íslensk málnefnd).

Writing system

Main articles:Icelandic orthographyandIcelandic Braille

The Icelandic alphabet is notable for its retention of three old letters that no longer exist in theEnglish alphabet:Þ, þ(þorn,modern English "thorn" ),Ð, ð(eð,anglicised as "eth" or "edh" ) andÆ, æ(æsc, anglicised as "ash" or "asc" ), with þ and ð representing thevoicelessandvoiced"th" sounds (as in Englishthinandthis), respectively, and æ representing thediphthong/ai/ which does not exist in English. The complete Icelandic alphabet is:

Majuscule forms(also calleduppercaseorcapital letters)
A	Á	B	D	Ð	E	É	F	G	H	I	Í	J	K	L	M	N	O	Ó	P	R	S	T	U	Ú	V	X	Y	Ý	Þ	Æ	Ö
Minuscule forms(also calledlowercaseorsmall letters)
a	á	b	d	ð	e	é	f	g	h	i	í	j	k	l	m	n	o	ó	p	r	s	t	u	ú	v	x	y	ý	þ	æ	ö

Theletters with diacritics,such asáandö,are for the most part treated as separate letters and not variants of their derivative vowels. The letteréofficially replacedjein 1929, although it had been used in early manuscripts (until the 14th century) and again periodically from the 18th century.The letterzwas formerly in the Icelandic alphabet, but it was officially removed in 1974, except in people's names.

See also

• Basque–Icelandic pidgin(apidginthat was used to trade withBasquewhalers)
• Icelandic exonyms
• Icelandic literature
• Icelandic name

References

Bibliography

• Árnason, Kristján; Sigrún Helgadóttir (1991). "Terminology and Icelandic Language Policy".Behovet och nyttan av terminologiskt arbete på 90-talet. Nordterm 5. Nordterm-symposium.pp. 7–21.
• Árnason, Kristján (2011),The Phonology of Icelandic and Faroese,Oxford University Press,ISBN978-0-19-922931-4
• Barbour, Stephen; Carmichael, Cathie (2000).Language and Nationalism in Europe.OUP Oxford.ISBN978-0-19-158407-7.
• Brown, Edward Keith; Ogilvie, Sarah (2010).Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world.Elsevier.ISBN9780080877754.OCLC944400471.
• Forbes, Charles Stuart (1860).Iceland: Its Volcanoes, Geysers, And Glaciers.Creative Media Partners, LLC. p. 61.ISBN978-1298551429.
• Halldórsson, Halldór (1979). "Icelandic Purism and its History".Word.30:76–86.
• Hilmarsson-Dunn, Amanda; Kristinsson, Ari Páll (2010)."The language situation in Iceland".Current Issues in Language Planning.11(3): 207–276.doi:10.1080/14664208.2010.538008.ISSN1466-4208.S2CID144856348.
• Karlsson, Stefán (2013) [2004].The Icelandic language.Translated by McTurk, Rory (Reprinted with minor corrections ed.). London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London.ISBN978-0-903521-61-1.
• Kress, Bruno (1982),Isländische Grammatik,VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie Leipzig
• Kristinsson, Ari Páll (1 November 2013)."Evolving language ideologies and media practices in Iceland / Die Entwicklung neuer Sprachideologien und Medienpraktiken in Island / Evolution des ideologies linguistiques et des pratiques médiatiques en Islande".Sociolinguistica(in German).27(1): 54–68.doi:10.1515/soci.2013.27.1.54.ISSN1865-939X.S2CID142164040.
• Kristinsson, Ari Páll (24 October 2014)."Ideologies in Iceland: The protection of language forms".In Hultgren, Anna Kristina; Gregersen, Frans; Thøgersen, Jacob (eds.).English in Nordic Universities.Studies in World Language Problems. Vol. 5. John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 165–177.doi:10.1075/wlp.5.08kri.ISBN978-90-272-2836-9.
• Kristinsson, Ari Páll (2018)."National language policy and planning in Iceland – aims and institutional activities"(PDF).Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Institute for Linguistics.Budapest: 243–249.ISBN978-963-9074-74-3.
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Ragnarsson, Baldur (1992).Mál og málsaga[Language and language history] (in Icelandic). Mál og Menning.ISBN978-9979-3-0417-3.

• Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur (1993).Íslensk hljóðkerfisfræði[Icelandic phonology]. Reykjavík: Málvísindastofnun Háskóla Íslands.ISBN9979-853-14-X.
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• Vikør, Lars S. (1993).The Nordic Languages. Their Status and Interrelations.Oslo: Novus Press. pp. 55–59, 168–169, 209–214.

External links

• The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
• Íðorðabankinn,dictionary for technical words.
• Collection of Icelandic bilingual dictionaries