Icelandic Language

Icelandic Language, language of the people of Iceland. Icelandic or Íslenska is a member of the West Scandinavian subgroup of the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is derived from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings who moved to Iceland from Norway in the 9th century ad. From 1380 to 1918 Iceland was ruled by Denmark; despite this, Icelandic remained virtually uninfluenced, its purity of form assured by geographical isolation and a strong literary tradition. Even today Icelandic differs little from Old Norse, and modern readers can easily read the medieval Eddas and sagas (see Icelandic Literature). Being derived from Old Norse, it is related linguistically to Faroese and Nynorsk Norwegian, although not mutually intelligible with these languages.

The Roman alphabet was introduced with Christianity in about the year 1000, but the older ð (eth, or voiced th as in English “then”) and þ (thorn, or unvoiced th as in English “thin”) were retained, as were æ (pronounced as in English word “I”) and ö (as in English “err”). The vowels may also take acute accents: á, é, í, ó, ú, and ý. Modern Icelandic, which is considered to date from 1540, when the New Testament was translated, is the most conservative of the Scandinavian languages and is still heavily inflected. Icelandic has three genders and four cases of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative); verbs have three persons. The pronouns and verb systems have changed little since the classical period. Pronunciation, however, has changed significantly since Old Norse times. The language is equally purist in vocabulary. Linguistic policy formulated in the 18th century generally prevents assimilation of foreign words, so that instead of international scientific and technological terms being adopted, for example, compounds of native Icelandic words are formed; in addition, old words are revived and new ones are created, based on native roots. Icelandic is a very uniform language with no significant dialectal differences.