Icelandic language

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Icelandic is a language spoken by about 390,000 people, most of them living on a North Atlantic island smaller than the state of Kentucky. Yet a modern speaker of Icelandic can pick up a manuscript written eight hundred years ago and read it with only modest effort. No other Germanic language comes close to that kind of continuity. How did a language freeze in place while its cousins transformed beyond recognition? And what does it take to keep a tongue alive in the modern world when barely a third of a million people use it? The answers run through medieval manuscripts, a 19th-century Danish linguist, a national parliament, and a stubborn cultural conviction that a language is worth fighting for.

• 2. Roots and Relations

  ›

  Around 900 CE, the settlers who arrived in Iceland brought Old Norse with them, the same tongue that Norse voyagers had carried to the Faroe Islands beginning in 825. Those settlers were not purely Scandinavian. Many descended from Norse communities already established in the Irish Sea region, and women from Norse Ireland, Orkney, and Shetland frequently married into the settler population before the journey to Iceland. That mixed heritage left traces in the early vocabulary, where a handful of Celtic words entered alongside the overwhelmingly Old Norse base.

  Faroese is the language most closely related to Icelandic today, followed by the western dialects of Norwegian and the now-extinct language Norn. Despite that family resemblance, Icelandic is not mutually intelligible with the mainland Scandinavian languages: Danish, Swedish, and standard Norwegian. The written forms of Icelandic and Faroese look strikingly similar on the page, but their spoken forms remain distinct enough that speakers cannot understand each other without prior study.

  The years of Dano-Norwegian and then Danish rule, which lasted from 1536 to 1918, applied almost no pressure to the spoken language. Ordinary Icelanders kept using their tongue in daily life, and the contrast with Norwegian, which Danish rule reshaped substantially, is stark. Danish influence showed up in the sentence structures of written literature, but even that would later be corrected by purists intent on bringing written Icelandic back toward its spoken form.

• 3. The Manuscripts and the Sagas

  ›

  The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic date to around 1100, and they record poetry and laws that had previously been held in memory and passed down by oral tradition. From the 12th century onward, writers in Iceland produced the sagas of Icelanders, a body of historical prose, and the Poetic Edda. These works are written in Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse, and they represent both a literary and a linguistic benchmark. They are what modern Icelanders reach back toward when they want to measure how much their language has or has not drifted.

  Most Icelanders today can follow the sagas when they are presented with updated modern spelling and footnotes. The comparison that scholars often reach for is Shakespeare in English: the texts are intact and mostly comprehensible, but they require a degree of attention that a contemporary newspaper does not. With some additional effort, many Icelanders can also work through the original manuscripts directly. The state-funded Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies exists partly to preserve those manuscripts and to sustain the scholarship that keeps them legible to new generations.

• 4. How a Language Stays Old

  ›

  Icelandic retains a four-case synthetic grammar: nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. Most other Germanic languages shed much of that case system centuries ago. German kept a version of it, but Icelandic goes further, preserving a wide variety of irregular declensions that German does not. Nouns carry one of three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, and each gender splits into strong and weak paradigms, which in turn divide into subclasses based on specific endings in the genitive singular and the nominative plural.

  Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number, and voice. Icelandic recognizes three voices: active, passive, and a middle voice whose exact status is debated, because every middle-voice verb has an active ancestor and the two forms can carry dramatically different meanings. The pair drepa, meaning to kill, and drepast, meaning to perish ignominiously, illustrates how far the meanings can diverge. Strong verbs, which form their past tense through a vowel change rather than a suffix, number roughly 150 to 200 and fall into six classes plus a group of reduplicative verbs.

  Word order defaults to subject-verb-object but is flexible enough that all six possible arrangements appear in poetry. In ordinary speech and prose, Icelandic follows the V2 rule shared by most Germanic languages: the conjugated verb sits in the second position in the main clause, regardless of what element the speaker places first for emphasis. A formal versus informal distinction in address, a feature of the language from the 17th century, weakened sharply in the 1950s and had effectively vanished from regular speech by mid-century. It survives today only in pre-written formal addresses to the bishop and to members of parliament.

• 5. Alphabet and the Rask Standard

  ›

  Rasmus Rask, a Danish linguist working in the 19th century, shaped the modern Icelandic alphabet by reviving a standard originally laid out in the early 12th century. That earlier standard appears in a document known as the First Grammatical Treatise, written by an author who has since been called the First Grammarian. Rask's version closely followed that treatise but introduced adjustments to align with contemporary Germanic conventions, including the exclusive use of k where the older document had sometimes used c.

  Three letters in the Icelandic alphabet no longer appear in the English alphabet. The letter Þ, called thorn, and Ð, called eth, represent the two different sounds that English writes as "th": the voiceless sound in thin and the voiced sound in this. The letter Æ, called ash, represents the diphthong heard in the English word ride. Letters bearing diacritics, such as á and ö, are treated as fully separate letters rather than variants of their base vowels.

  Two changes came in the 20th century. The letter é officially replaced je in 1929, though é had appeared in early manuscripts up to the 14th century and then periodically from the 18th century onward. The letter z was abolished in 1973. It faded from common use gradually after the 1980s, though it persists in some personal names. A much earlier shift, between 1400 and 1600, had already merged the letters y and ý with i and í, and the letter æ, once a simple open-e sound, had by that period become the diphthong ai.

• 6. Purism as Policy

  ›

  Bishop Oddur Einarsson wrote in 1589 that the Icelandic language had remained unspoiled since the age of the ancient literature. That claim planted a flag that later generations would spend centuries defending. By the late 18th century, linguistic purism had grown into a movement, driven partly by Romanticism's influence in the early 19th century, which shifted the focus from written purity alone to the purity of spoken language as well.

  The practical outcome is a distinctive approach to new vocabulary. When Icelandic needs a word for a new concept, the preference is to build it from existing Icelandic roots rather than borrow from English or another language. The Icelandic Language Council, whose members represent universities, the arts, journalism, teachers, and the Ministry of Culture, Science and Education, advises authorities on language policy. Various societies publish dictionaries with the help of the Icelandic Language Committee, and new compound words are coined regularly, especially for science and technology.

  The movement's success has been uneven. Some foreign words have resisted replacement and remain in common use. In speech, many Icelanders use foreign words freely; the effort to avoid them concentrates in writing. Early Icelandic vocabulary borrowed from French for words related to the court and knighthood and from Low German for terms in trade and commerce. Christianity's arrival in the 11th century brought a wave of new religious vocabulary, mostly drawn from other Scandinavian languages, with kirkja, meaning church, as a well-known example. Since the late 18th century, however, the dominant impulse has run in the opposite direction.

• 7. Names, Law, and Community

  ›

  Icelandic names follow a patronymic system, and sometimes a matronymic one: a child's family name is formed from the first name of their father or mother in the genitive case, followed by -son for a son or -dóttir for a daughter. This system was once common across the Nordic region but has been maintained in Iceland while other Nordic countries moved to heritable family surnames. In 2019, changes to naming law permitted Icelanders officially registered with non-binary gender to use the suffix -bur, meaning child of, as an alternative to -son or -dóttir.

  On the 16th of November each year, since 1995, Iceland marks Icelandic Language Day by celebrating the birthday of Jónas Hallgrímsson, a 19th-century poet. Iceland is a member of the Nordic Council, which uses Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish as its working languages; Icelandic is not a working language, though the council does publish material in it. Under the Nordic Language Convention, in force since 1987, Icelandic citizens have the right to use Icelandic when dealing with official bodies in other Nordic countries, covering situations such as hospital visits, interactions with the police, and social security matters, without incurring translation or interpretation costs.

  An act passed by the Icelandic Parliament in 2011 declared Icelandic the national language of the Icelandic people and the official language of Iceland, and directed public authorities to ensure its use is possible across all areas of Icelandic society. Outside Iceland, the largest communities of Icelandic speakers are in Denmark, with about 8,000 speakers, and in the United States, with about 5,000. More than 1,400 speakers live in Canada, concentrated in the Manitoba region known as New Iceland, which Icelandic settlers began to establish in the 1880s.