The language is moreconservative than most other Germanic languages. While most of them have greatly reduced levels ofinflection (particularly noundeclension), Icelandic retains a four-casesynthetic grammar (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 regulator maintaining an active policy of coining terms based on older Icelandic words rather than directly taking inloanwords from other languages.
Aside from the 300,000 Icelandic speakers in Iceland, Icelandic is spoken by about 8,000 people in Denmark,[4] 5,000 people in the United States,[5] and more than 1,400 people in Canada,[6] notably in the region known asNew Iceland inManitoba which was settled by Icelanders beginning in the 1880s.
Icelandic is anIndo-European language and belongs to theNorth Germanic group of theGermanic languages. Icelandic is further classified as a West Scandinavian language.[8] Icelandic is derived from an earlier languageOld Norse, which later becameOld Icelandic and currently Modern Icelandic. The division between old and modern Icelandic is said to be before and after 1540.[9]
Around 900 CE, the language spoken in the Faroes wasOld Norse, which Norse settlers had brought with them during the time of the settlement of Faroe Islands (landnám) that began in 825. However, many of the settlers were not fromScandinavia, but descendants of Norse settlers in theIrish Sea region. In addition, women from Norse Ireland,Orkney, orShetland often married native Scandinavian men before settling in the Faroe Islands and Iceland.[10]
The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100. Many of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved orally. The most famous of the texts, which were written inIceland from 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 alphabet has developed from a standard established in the 19th century, primarily by the Danish linguistRasmus Rask. It is based strongly on anorthography laid out in the early 12th century by a document referred to as theFirst Grammatical Treatise by 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 concurrentGermanic conventions, such as the exclusive use ofk rather thanc. Various archaic features, such 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 ofé instead ofje[11] and the replacement ofz withs in 1974.[12]
Apart from the addition of new vocabulary, written Icelandic has not changed substantially since the 11th century, when the first texts were written onvellum.[13] Modern speakers can understand the original sagas andEddas which 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's works). With some effort, many Icelanders can also understand the original manuscripts.
According to an act passed by theParliament in 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".[14]
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).[15] 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.[16][17] 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).[18] 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.[19][20]
All Icelandicstops are voiceless and are distinguished as such byaspiration.[21] Stops are realised post-aspirated when at the beginning of the word, but pre-aspirated when occurring within a word.[22][b]
/n̥ntʰt/ are laminaldenti-alveolar,/s/ is apical alveolar,[23]/θð/ are alveolar non-sibilant fricatives; the former islaminal, while the latter is usuallyapical.[24]
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].[25]
/j̊/ are phonetic to Einarsson and Haugen, but are always indistinguishable from [ç].[26][27][28][29][30]
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].[31]
Icelandic has 8 monophthongs and 5 diphthongs.[32] The diphthongs are created by taking a monophthong and adding either/i/ or/u/ to it.[33] All the vowels can either be long or short; vowels in open syllables are long, and vowels in closed syllables are short.[34]
Icelandic retains many grammatical features of other ancientGermanic languages, and resemblesOld Norwegian before much of itsfusional inflection was lost. Modern Icelandic is still a heavilyinflected language with fourcases:nominative,accusative,dative andgenitive. Icelandic nouns can have one of threegrammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. There are two main declension paradigms for each gender:strong andweak nouns, and these are further divided into subclasses of nouns, based primarily on thegenitive singular andnominative plural endings 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.
Verbs areconjugated fortense,mood,person,number andvoice. 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"). 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 personsingular present.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 pronoun instead. 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 order restriction, 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. (I know it not.)
Ekki veit ég það. (Not know I it.)
Það veit ég ekki. (It know 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 verbsveit andfór are always thesecond element in their respective clauses.
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.[36] It no longer exists in regular speech, but may occasionally be found in pre-written speeches addressed to thebishop and members ofparliament.[36]
A simple family tree showing the Icelandic patronymic naming system.Eyjafjallajökull, one of the smaller ice caps of Iceland, situated to the north ofSkógar and to the west ofMýrdalsjökull, is Icelandic for "glacier ofEyjafjöll", in turn "glacier of island mountains".
Early Icelandic vocabulary was largelyOld Norse with a few words being Celtic from when Celts first settled in Iceland.[37][38] Theintroduction of Christianity to Iceland in the 11th century[39] brought 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:French brought many words related to the court and knightship; words in thesemantic field of trade and commerce have been borrowed fromLow German because of trade connections. In the late 18th century,linguistic purism began to gain noticeable ground in Iceland and since the early 19th century it has been the linguistic policy of the country.[40] Nowadays, it is common practice tocoin new compound words from Icelandic derivatives.
Icelandic personal names arepatronymic (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 mostWestern systems 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.[41]
In 2019, changes were announced to the laws governing names. Icelanders who are officially registered withnon-binary gender will be permitted to use the suffix-bur ("child of") instead of-son or-dóttir.[42]
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.[43] 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.[44] The Icelandic speech community is perceived to have a protectionist language culture,[41] 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.[45]
Since 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.[46] Later in the 18th century the purism movement grew and more works were translated into Icelandic, especially in areas that Icelandic had hardly ever been used in. Manyneologisms were introduced, with many of them being loan-translations.[46] In the early 19th century, due to the influence ofromanticism, importance was put on the purity of spoken language as well. The written language was also brought closer to the spoken language, as the sentence structure of literature had previously been influenced byDanish andGerman.[47]
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 in 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.[48] 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).[49]
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 thevoiceless andvoiced "th" sounds (as in Englishthin andthis), respectively, and æ representing thediphthong /ai/ (as in Englishride). The complete Icelandic alphabet is:
Theletters with diacritics, such asá andö, are for the most part treated as separate letters and not variants of their derivative vowels. The letteré officially replacedje in 1929, although it had been used in early manuscripts (until the 14th century) and again periodically from the 18th century.[11] The letterz was formerly in the Icelandic alphabet, but it was abolished in 1973, except in people's names.[12][50]
The following is a sample text of Article 1 of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights. Two major version are circulating: this is the one found on the United Nation's website and in an illustrated book co-edited by the Icelandic Human Rights Office and Iceland's Ministry of foreign affairs. The first line is the orthographic version;[51][52] the second is theInternational Phonetic Alphabet transciption; the third is the gloss.
Grein1: Allir eru bornir frjálsir og jafnir öðrum að virðingu og réttindum. Allir eru gæddir skynsemi og samvisku og {ber að} breyta bróðurlega hverjum við annan.
Article-N.SG.DF one-NT.N.SG: All-N.PL.IDF be\PRS.IND-3PL born-M.N.PL.IDF free-M.N.PL.IDF and equal-M.N.PL.IDF (an)other\-D.PL {in terms of} respect-D.SG.IDF and {rights-D.IDF .} All-N.PL.IDF be\PRS.IND-3PL endowed-M.N.PL.IDF rea.son-D.IDF and con.science-D.IDF and be.to-PRS.IMP.SHRT behave-INF brother.ly-ADV each-D.PL with {(an)other-MA.A.SG .}
Article 1: All [humans] are born free and equal from another in terms of respect and rights. All are endowed with conscience and reason and are to behave brotherly with one another.
The second version by the United Nations Information Centre of Denmark is found on theOHCHR website.[53]
Grein1: Hver maður er borinn frjáls og jafn öðrum að virðingu og réttindum. Menn eru gæddir vitsmunum og samvi[s]ku, og ber þeim {að breyta} bróðurlega hverjum við annan.
Article-N.SG.DF one-NT.N.SG: each-MA.N.SG person-N.SG.IDF be\PRS.IND-3SG born-M.N.SG.IDF free-M.N.SG.IDF and equal-M.N.SG.IDF (an)other\-D.PL {in terms of} respect-D.SG.IDF and {rights-D.IDF .} People\N.PL.IDF be\PRS.IND-3PL endowed-M.N.PL.IDF intel.ligence(s)-D.IDF and {con.science-D.IDF ,} and be.to-PRS.IMP.SHRT D.PL {to behave-INF} brother.ly-ADV each-D.PL with {(an)other-MA.A.SG .}
Article 1: Each person is born free and equal from another in terms of respect and rights. People are endowed with intelligence and reason, and are to behave brotherly with one another.
^Sanders, Ruth (2010).German: Biography of a Language. Oxford University Press. p. 209.Overall, written Icelandic has changed little since the eleventh century Icelandic sagas, or historical epics; only the addition of significant numbers of vocabulary items in modern times makes it likely that a saga author would have difficulty understanding the news in today's [Icelandic newspapers].
^"Act [No 61/2011] on the status of the Icelandic language and Icelandic sign language"(PDF).Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. p. 1. Retrieved15 November 2013.Article 1; National language – official language; Icelandic is the national language of the Icelandic people and the official language in Iceland. Article 2; The Icelandic language — The national language is the common language of the Icelandic general public. Public authorities shall ensure that its use is possible in all areas of Icelandic society. All persons residing in Iceland must be given the opportunity to learn Icelandic and to use it for their general participation in Icelandic society, as further provided in leges speciales.
^Robert Berman."The English Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency of Icelandic students, and how to improve it". Archived fromthe original on 4 March 2016.English is often described as being almost a second language in Iceland, as opposed to a foreign language like German or Chinese. Certainly in terms of Icelandic students' Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS), English does indeed seem to be a second language. However, in terms of many Icelandic students' Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP)—the language skills required for success in school—evidence will be presented suggesting that there may be a large number of students who have substantial trouble utilizing these skills.
^Kress 1982, pp. 23-24: "It's never voiced, ass insausen, and it's pronounced by pressing the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, close to the upper teeth – somewhat below the place of articulation of the Germansch. The difference is that Germansch is labialized, while Icelandics is not. It's a pre-alveolar, coronal, voiceless spirant.".
^Einarsson, Stefan (1949).Icelandic. Johns Hopkins Press.
^Haugen, Einar (1958). "The Phonemics of Modern Icelandic".Language.34 1:55–88.
^Moran, Steven; McCloy, Daniel, eds. (2019).Icelandic sound inventory (SPA). Stanford Phonology Archive. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
Árnason, Kristján; Helgadóttir, Sigrún (1991). "Terminology and Icelandic Language Policy".Behovet och nyttan av terminologiskt arbete på 90-talet. Nordterm. Vol. 5. pp. 7–21.
Árnason, Kristján (2011).The Phonology of Icelandic and Faroese. Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-922931-4.
Forbes, Charles St. (1860).Iceland: Its Volcanoes, Geysers, And Glaciers. Creative Media Partners. p. 61.ISBN978-1-298-55142-9.{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
Halldórsson, Halldór (1979). "Icelandic Purism and its History".Word.30:76–86.
Karlsson, Stefán (2013) [2004].The Icelandic language. Translated by McTurk, Rory (1st Reprinted with minor corrections ed.). London: Viking Society for Northern Research,UCL.ISBN978-0-903521-61-1.
Þráinsson, Höskuldur (1994). "Icelandic". In König, Ekkehard; Van der Auwera, Johan (eds.).The Germanic languages. Routledge language family descriptions. London: Routledge.ISBN978-0-415-05768-4.
Van der Hulst, Harry (2008).Word Prosodic Systems in the Languages of Europe. Mouton de Gruyter. p. 377.ISBN978-1-282-19366-6.OCLC741344348.
Vikør, Lars S. (1993).The Nordic Languages: Their Status and Interrelations. Oslo: Novus Press. pp. 55–59,168–169,209–214.
