| Icelandic | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| íslenska | ||||
| Pronunciation | [is(t)lɛnska] | |||
| Spoken in | Iceland, Denmark, Faroe Islands |
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| Native speakers | 310,000 (2011)[1] | |||
| Language family |
Indo-European
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| Writing system | Latin (Icelandic alphabet) | |||
| Official status | ||||
| Official language in | Iceland | |||
| Regulated by | Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in an advisory capacity | |||
| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 639-1 | is | |||
| ISO 639-2 | ice (B) isl (T) |
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| ISO 639-3 | isl | |||
| Linguasphere | 52-AAA-aa | |||
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Icelandic () is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.
Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the colonisation of the Americas. Icelandic, Faroese, Norn as well as Norwegian formerly comprised West Nordic; Danish and Swedish comprised East Nordic. The Nordic languages are now divided into Insular Nordic and mainland Scandinavian languages. Norwegian is now grouped with Danish and Swedish because of its mutual intelligibility with those languages due to its heavy influence from them over the last millennium, particularly from Danish.
Most Western European languages have greatly reduced levels of inflection, particularly noun declension. In contrast, Icelandic retains an inflectional grammar comparable to that of Latin and that of the medieval Germanic languages including Old Norse and Old English. The main difference between Icelandic and Latin inflectionally is in verbs. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and adverbs are handled similarly in both languages. Icelandic possesses many instances of oblique cases without any governing word, like Latin. For example, many of the various Latin ablatives have a corresponding Icelandic dative.
The vast majority of Icelandic speakers live in Iceland. There are about 8,165 speakers of Icelandic living in Denmark,[2] of whom approximately 3,000 are students.[3] The language is also spoken by 5,112 people in the USA[4] and by 2,170 in Canada[5] (mostly in Gimli, Manitoba). Ninety-seven percent of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongue,[6] but in some communities outside Iceland the use of the language is declining. Icelandic speakers outside Iceland represent recent emigration in almost all cases except Gimli, which was settled from the 1880s onwards.
The Icelandic constitution does not mention the language as the official language of the country. Though Iceland is a member of the Nordic Council, the Council uses only Danish, Norwegian and Swedish as its working languages. The council does, though, publish material in Icelandic.[7] Under the Nordic Language Convention, since 1987, citizens of Iceland have the opportunity to use Icelandic when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable for any interpretation or translation costs. The Convention covers visits to hospitals, job centres, the police and social security offices;[8][9] however, the Convention is not very well known and is mostly irrelevant as many Icelanders born after the 1940s have an excellent command of English. The countries have committed themselves to providing services in various languages, but citizens have no absolute rights except for criminal and court matters.[10][11]
The state-funded Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies serves 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 the Ministry of Culture, Science and Education, advises the authorities on language policy. The Icelandic Language Fund supports activities intended to promote the Icelandic language. Since 1995, on November 16 each year, the birthday of 19th century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson is celebrated as Icelandic Language Day.[6][12]
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The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD. Much of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved orally. The most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland from the 12th century onward, are the Icelandic Sagas. They comprise the historical works and the eddaic poems.
The language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. The Danish rule of Iceland from 1380 to 1918 had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic, which remained in daily use among the general population except for a period between about 1700 and 1900 where the use of Danish by common Icelanders became popular. The same applied to the Allied occupation of Iceland during World War II.
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, and y/ý).
The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from a standard established in the 19th century primarily by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask. It is ultimately based heavily on an orthography laid out in the early 12th century by a mysterious document referred to as The First 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 concurrent Germanic conventions, such as the exclusive use of k rather than c. Various archaic features, as the letter ð, had not been used much in later centuries. Rask's standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th century changes include the use of é instead of je and the removal of z from the alphabet in 1973.[13]
Written Icelandic has changed little since the 13th century. Modern speakers can understand the original sagas and Eddas which were written about eight hundred years ago, though this ability is sometimes overstated. The Sagas are usually read with updated modern spelling and footnotes but otherwise intact (as with modern English readers of Shakespeare). With some effort, many Icelanders can also understand the original manuscripts.
Icelandic has very minor dialectal differences phonetically. The language has both monophthongs and diphthongs, and consonants can be voiced or unvoiced.
Voice plays a primary role in the differentiation of most consonants including the nasals but excluding the plosives. The plosives b, d, and g are voiceless and differ from p, t and k only by their lack of aspiration. Preaspiration occurs before geminate (long or double consonants) p, t and k. It does not occur before geminate b, d or g. Pre-aspirated tt is analogous etymologically and phonetically to German and Dutch cht (compare Icelandic nótt, dóttir with the German Nacht, Tochter and the Dutch nacht, dochter).
| Bilabial | Labio- dental |
Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m̥ | m | n̥ | n | ɲ̊ | ɲ | ŋ̊ | ŋ | ||||||
| Plosive | pʰ | p | tʰ | t | cʰ | c | kʰ | k | ʔ | |||||
| Fricative | f | v | θ | ð | s | ç | j | x | ɣ | h | ||||
| Approximant | l̥ ɫ | l ɫ | ||||||||||||
| Trill | r̥ | r | ||||||||||||
The voiced fricatives /v/, /ð/, /j/ and /ɣ/ are not completely constrictive and are often closer to approximants than fricatives.
| Front | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| plain | round | ||
| Close | i | u | |
| Near-close | ɪ | ʏ | |
| Open-mid | ɛ | œ | ɔ |
| Open | a | ||
| Front offglide |
Back offglide |
|
|---|---|---|
| Mid | ei • øi | ou |
| Open | ai | au |
Icelandic retains many grammatical features of other ancient Germanic languages, and resembles Old Norwegian before much of its fusional inflection was lost. Modern Icelandic is still a heavily inflected language with four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Icelandic nouns can have one of three grammatical genders—masculine, feminine or neuter. There are two main declension paradigms for each gender: strong and weak nouns, which are furthermore divided in sub-classes of nouns, based primarily on the genitive singular and nominative plural ending of a particular noun. For example, within the masculine nouns that have a strong declension, there is a sub-class (class 1) that declines with an -s (Hests) in the genitive singular and -ar (Hestar) in the nominative plural. However there is another sub-class (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 a quirky subject, which is a phenomenon whereby certain verbs specify that their subjects are to be in a case other than the nominative.
Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in the four cases, and for number in the singular and plural. T-V distinction ("þérun") in modern Icelandic seems on the verge of extinction, yet can still be found, especially in structured official address and traditional phrases.
Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. 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 (owing to the fact that every middle-voice verb has an active ancestor but concomitant are sometimes drastic changes in meaning, and the fact that the middle-voice verbs form a conjugation group of their own). Examples might be koma (come) vs. komast (get there), drepa (kill) vs. drepast (perish ignominiously) and taka (take) vs. takast (manage to). In every case mentioned the meaning has been so altered, that one can hardly see them as the same verb in different voices. They have up to ten tenses, but Icelandic, like English, forms most of these with auxiliary verbs. There are three or four main groups of weak verbs in Icelandic, depending on whether one takes a historical or formalistic view.: -a, -i, and -ur, referring to the endings that these verbs take when conjugated in the first person singular present. Some Icelandic infinitives end with the -ja suffix, some with á, two with u (munu, skulu) one with o (þvo-wash) and one with e (the Danish borrowing ske which is probably withdrawing its presence). For many verbs that require an object, a reflexive pronoun can be used 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 class of strong verbs, few as they may be (ca. 150-200) is divided into six plus reduplicative verbs. They still make up some of the most frequently used verbs. (Að vera, to be is the example par excellence, possessing two subjunctives and two imperatives in addition to being made up of different stems.) There is also a class of auxiliary verbs, a class called the -ri verbs (4-5 depending who is counting) and then the oddity að valda (to cause), called the only totally irregular verb in Icelandic, although each and every form of it is caused by common and regular sound changes.
The basic word order in Icelandic is subject–verb–object. However, as words are heavily inflected, the word order is fairly flexible and every combination may occur in poetry, i.e. SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS are all allowed for metrical purposes. However like German, the conjugated verb in Icelandic usually appears second in the sentence, preceded by the word or phrase being emphasised. For example:
In the above examples, the conjugated verbs veit and fór are always the second element in their respective sentences.
Early Icelandic vocabulary was largely Old Norse. The introduction of Christianity to Iceland in the 11th century brought with it a need to describe new religious concepts. The majority of new words were taken from other Scandinavian languages; kirkja (‘church’) and biskup (‘bishop’), for example. Numerous other languages have had their influence on Icelandic: French brought many words related to the court and knightship; words in the semantic field of trade and commerce have been borrowed from Low German because of trade connections. In the late 18th century, language purism began to gain noticeable ground in Iceland and since the early 19th century it has been the linguistic policy of the country (see linguistic purism in Icelandic). Nowadays, it is common practice to coin new compound words from Icelandic derivatives.
Icelandic personal names are patronymic (and sometimes matronymic) in that they reflect the immediate father (or mother) of the child and not the historic family lineage. This system differs from most Western family name systems, but was formerly used throughout Scandinavia.
During the 18th century, a movement was started by writers and other educated people of the country to rid the language of foreign words as much as possible and to create a new vocabulary and adapt the Icelandic language to the evolution of new concepts, and thus not having to resort to borrowed neologisms as in many other languages. Many old words that had fallen into disuse were recycled and given new senses in the modern language, and neologisms were created from Old Norse roots. For example, the word rafmagn ("electricity"), literally means "amber power" from Greek elektron ("amber"); similarly, the word sími ("telephone") originally meant "cord" and tölva ("computer") is a portmanteau of tala ("digit; number") and völva ("seeress").
The Icelandic alphabet is notable for its retention of two old letters which no longer exist in the English alphabet: Þ,þ (þorn, anglicised as "thorn") and Ð,ð (eð, anglicised as "eth" or "edh"), representing the voiceless and voiced "th" sounds as in English thin and this respectively. The complete Icelandic alphabet is:
| Majuscule Forms (also called uppercase or capital 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 called lowercase or small 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 |
The letters with diacritics, such as á and ö, are considered to be separate letters and not variants of their derivative vowels. The letter é was officially adopted in 1929 replacing je,[14] and z was officially abolished in 1973.
As Icelandic shares its ancestry with English, there are many cognate words in both languages; each have the same or a similar meaning and are derived from a common root. The possessive of a noun is often signified with the ending -s like in English but never for pluralisation. Phonological and orthographical changes in each of the languages will have changed spelling and pronunciation. But a few examples are given below.
| English word | Icelandic word | Spoken comparison |
|---|---|---|
| apple | epli | |
| book | bók | |
| high/hair | hár | |
| house | hús | |
| mother | móðir | |
| night | nótt | |
| stone | steinn | |
| that | það | |
| word | orð |
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