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Icelandic language

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Icelandic
íslenska
Pronunciation[islɛnska]
Native toIceland, Denmark, USA[1] and Canada[2]
RegionIceland
Native speakers
300,000
Indo-European
Latin (Icelandic variant)
Official status
Official language in
 Iceland
Regulated byÁrni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
Language codes
ISO 639-1is
ISO 639-2ice (B)
isl (T)
ISO 639-3isl

Icelandic (íslenskaⓘ) is a North Germanic language, the official language of Iceland and the mother tongue of the Icelandic people. Its closest relative is Faroese and various West Norwegian dialects.

While most Western European languages have reduced greatly the extent of inflection, particularly in noun declension, Icelandic retains an inflectional grammar comparable to that of Latin, Ancient Greek, or more closely, Old Norse and Old English.

Classification

Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages. It is the closest living relative of Faroese, who—along with Icelandic and Norwegian—make up the West Scandinavian language branch, the descendants of the western dialects of Old Norse. Danish and Swedish make up the other branch, called the East Scandinavian languages. More recent analysis divide the North Germanic languages into insular Scandinavian and continental Scandinavian languages, grouping Norwegian with Danish and Swedish based on mutual intelligibility and the fact that Norwegian has been heavily influenced by East Scandinavian (particularly Danish) during the last millennium and has diverged considerably from both Faroese and Icelandic.

Geographic distribution

The vast majority of Icelandic speakers hail from Iceland. There are about 8,165 speakers of Icelandic living in Denmark,[3] of which approximately 3000 are students[4]. The language is also spoken by 5,655 people in the USA[1] and by 2,385 in Canada[2] (mostly in Gimli, Manitoba). 97% of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongue[5], but in communities outside Iceland the usage of the language is declining.

Iceland is the only territory where Icelandic enjoys official status. It is also the only 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, though it publishes material in Icelandic [6]. 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 to any interpretation or translation costs. The Convention covers visits to hospitals, job centres, the police and social security offices[7][8].

The state-funded Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies serves as a center for preserving the medieval Icelandic manuscripts and studying the language and its literature. The Icelandic Language Council, made up of 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, November 16 each year, the birthday of 19th century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson, is celebrated as the Icelandic Language Day[9][5].

Icelandic is a language nearly without dialects.

History

Main article: History of the Icelandic language
A page from the Landnámabók

The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100. Many of them are actually based on material like poetry and laws, preserved orally for generations before being written down. The most famous of these, which were written in Iceland from the 12th century onward, are without doubt the Icelandic Sagas, the historical writings of Snorri Sturluson and eddaic poems.

The language of the era of the sagas is called Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse, the common Scandinavian language of the Viking era. Old Icelandic was, in the strict sense of the term, Old Norse with some Celtic influence. The Danish rule of Iceland from 1380 to 1918 has had little effect on the evolution of Icelandic, which remained in daily use among the general population and Danish was not used for official communications. The same applied for the American occupation of Iceland during World War II and was gradually withdrawn in the 1950s.

Though Icelandic is considered more archaic than other living Germanic languages, important changes have occurred. The pronunciation, for instance, changed considerably from the 12th to the 16th century, especially of vowels.

The modern Icelandic alphabet has developed from a standard established in the 19th century, by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask primarily. It is ultimately based heavily on an orthographic standard created 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 basically a re-enactment of the old treatise, with some changes to fit concurrent Germanic conventions, such as the exclusive use of k rather than c. Various old features, like ð, had actually not seen much use in the later centuries, so Rask's standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th century changes are most notably the adoption of é, which had previously been written as je (reflecting the modern pronunciation), and the abolition of z in 1974.

Written Icelandic has, thus, changed relatively little since the 13th century. As a result of this, and of the similarity between the modern and ancient grammar, modern speakers can still understand, more or less, the original sagas and Eddas that were written some eight hundred years ago. This ability is sometimes mildly overstated by Icelanders themselves, most of whom actually read the Sagas with updated modern spelling and footnotes — though otherwise intact.

Linguistic purism

Main article: Linguistic purism in Icelandic

During the 18th century, the Icelandic authorities implemented a stringent policy of linguistic purism. As a result of this policy, some writers and terminologists were put in charge of the creation of new vocabulary to adapt the Icelandic language to the evolution of new concepts, and thus not having to resort to borrowed neologisms like in many other languages. Many old words that had fallen into misuse were updated to fit in with 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 "wire" and tölva ("computer") combines tala ("digit; number") and völva ("magician").

Phonology

Main article: Icelandic phonology
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Unlike many languages, Icelandic has only very minor dialectal differences in sounds, due to the relatively small number of speakers and the concentration of these speakers in mostly one area. The language has both monophthongs and diphthongs, and consonants can be voiced or unvoiced.

Voice plays a big role in the pronunciation of many consonants. For most Icelandic consonants, there are voiced and unvoiced counterparts. However, b, d, and g are never voiced in Icelandic. These letters only differ from p, t and k because they become aspirated when they are the first letter of a word; b, d and g do not.

Consonants

Consonant phones
  Bilabial Labio-
dental 		Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Plosive pʰ p     tʰ t     cʰ c kʰ k ʔ  
Nasal m̥ m     n̥ n     ɲ̊ ɲ ŋ̊ ŋ    
Fricative     f v θ ð s   ç j x ɣ h  
Trill             r̥ r            
Lateral approximant             l̥  l̥ɣ l lɣ            

The voiced fricatives [v], [ð], [j] and [ɣ] are not completely constrictive and are often closer to approximants than fricatives.

Vowels

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

Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right of the dot represents a rounded vowel.

Diphthongs Closer component
is front 		Closer component
is back
More open component is mid ei • øy ou
More open component is fully open ai au

Grammar

Main article: Icelandic grammar

Icelandic retains many grammatical features of other ancient Germanic languages, and resembles Old Norwegian before its inflection was greatly simplified. Modern Icelandic 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 smaller paradigms for declension, according to many criteria (sound-shifts, consonant clusters etc.) Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in the four cases, and for number in the singular and plural.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are three voices: active, passive and medial; but it may be debated whether the medial voice is a voice or simply an independent class of verbs of its own. They have up to ten tenses, but Icelandic, like English, forms most of these with auxiliary verbs. There are three main groups of verbs in Icelandic: -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. 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.

The basic word order in Icelandic is subject-verb-object, but because of how diverse the inflection of words is, the word order is fairly flexible.

Vocabulary

Main articles: Icelandic vocabulary and Icelandic name
A simple family tree showing the Icelandic patronymic naming system.

Early Icelandic vocabulary was largely Old Norse. The introduction of Christianity to Iceland in the 11th century bought 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 for example 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 started to gain noticeable ground in Iceland; since the early 19th century, language purism has been the linguistic policy in the country (see linguistic purism in Icelandic). Nowadays, it is common practice to coin new compound words from Icelandic derivatives.

Icelandic names differ from most Western family name systems by being patronymic (and sometimes matronymic) in that they reflect the immediate father (or mother) of the child and not the historic family lineage. Iceland shares a common cultural heritage with the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Icelanders, unlike other Scandinavians, have continued to use their traditional name system, which was formerly used in all of Scandinavia.

Writing system

Main articles: Icelandic alphabet and Icelandic orthography

The Icelandic alphabet is notable for its retention of two old letters which no longer exist in the English alphabet: Þ,þ (þorn, anglicized as "thorn") and Ð,ð (eð, anglicized 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

It should be noted that accented letters, such as á and ö, are considered to be separate letters and not variants of their derivative vowels. The letter é was adopted in the late 20th century, and z was officially abolished in 1974.

Cognates with English

As Icelandic shares its ancestry with English, there are some cognate words in both languages; each have the same or a similar meaning and are derived from a common root. Phonological and orthographical changes in each of the languages will have changed spelling and pronunciation; however, it should be noted that Icelandic words are likely to have an orthography much more similar to that of their Old Norse derivatives than their English cousins. But a few examples are given below.

English word Icelandic word Spoken comparison
apple epli listenⓘ
book bók listenⓘ
high hár listenⓘ
house hús listenⓘ
mother móður listenⓘ
night nótt listenⓘ
stone steinn listenⓘ
that það listenⓘ
word orð listenⓘ

This effect is common across all Germanic languages’ core vocabularies, of course with exceptions. It should also be noted that the similarity between cognates is made more apparatent when the words are spoken; orthographical reform may have changed the spelling so that it no longer reflects its pronunciation.

Common phrases

Translation Phrase IPA
Icelandic íslenska /islɛnska/
Hello Góðan daginn.
(Halló)		 /kouðan tajːɪn/
/halːou/
My name is Magnús. Ég heiti Magnús. /jɛːɣ heiːtɪ maknus/
Good evening Gott kvöld. /kɔht kʰvœlt/
Good night Góða nótt. /kouða nouht/
Good-bye Bless. /plɛs/
Thank you Þakka þér fyrir. /θahka ðjɛr fɪːrɪr/
That það /θað/
How much does it cost? Hvað kostar það? /kʰvað kɔstar ða(ð)/
Yes Já /jau/
No Nei /nei/
Where is the bathroom? Hvar er salernið? /kʰvar ɛ:r saːlɛrtnɪð/
Do you speak English? Talar þú ensku? /tʰa:lar θu enskø/
I don't understand Ég skil ekki. /jɛːɣ scʰɪːl ɛhcɪ/
Excuse me Afsakið. /afsacɪð/
I don't know Ég veit ekki. /jɛɣ vɛit ɛhkɪ/

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "MLA Language Map Data Center: Icelandic". Modern Language Association. undated. Retrieved 2007-04-26. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) Based on 2000 US census data.
  2. ^ a b Canadian census 2001
  3. ^ Statbank Danish statistics
  4. ^ Official Iceland website
  5. ^ a b "Icelandic: At Once Ancient And Modern" (PDF). Icelandic Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. 2001. Retrieved 2007-04-27.
  6. ^ "Norden". Retrieved 2007-04-27.
  7. ^ "Nordic Language Convention". Retrieved 2007-04-27.
  8. ^ "Nordic Language Convention". Retrieved 2007-04-27.
  9. ^ "Menntamalarduneyti". Retrieved 2007-04-27.

Bibliography

  • Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson (1993). Íslensk hljóðkerfisfræði. Reykjavík: Málvísindastofnun Háskóla Íslands. ISBN 9979-853-14-X.
  • Guðrún Kvaran, Höskuldur Þráinsson, Kristján Árnason; et al. (2005). Íslensk tunga I–III. Reykjavík: Almenna bókafélagið. ISBN 9979-2-1900-9. {{cite book}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Halldór Halldórsson (1979). "Icelandic Purism and its History". Word. 30: 76–86.
  • Kristján Árnason (1991). "Terminology and Icelandic Language Policy". Behovet och nyttan av terminologiskt arbete på 90-talet. Nordterm 5. Nordterm-symposium. pp. pp. 7-21. {{cite conference}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Orešnik, Janez, and Magnús Pétursson (1977). "Quantity in Modern Icelandic". Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi. 92: 155–71.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Scholten, Daniel (2000). Einführung in die isländische Grammatik. Munich: Philyra Verlag. ISBN 3-935267-00-2.
  • Vikør, Lars S. (1993). The Nordic Languages. Their Status and Interrelations. Oslo: Novus Press. pp. pp. 55-59, 168–169, 209–214. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)

General

French wiktionary has a page about a term in this article:
Icelandic edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dictionaries


Template:Icelandic topics

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