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| Icelandic íslenska | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation: | [ˈislɛnska] | |
| Spoken in: | Iceland, Denmark, USA and Canada | |
| Region: | Iceland | |
| Total speakers: | 300,000 | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Germanic North Germanic West Scandinavian Icelandic | |
| Writing system: | Latin (Icelandic variant) | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language in: |  Iceland
| |
| Regulated by: | Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | is | |
| ISO 639-2: | ice (B) | isl (T) |
| ISO 639-3: | isl | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Icelandic (íslenska ) is a North Germanic language, the official language of Iceland and the mother tongue of the Icelandic people. Its closest relatives are Faroese and West Norwegian dialects such as Sognamål.
While most West European languages have reduced greatly the extent of inflection, particularly in noun declension, Icelandic retains an inflectional grammar comparable to that of Latin or, more closely, Old Norse and Old English.
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Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages. It is the closest living relative of Faroese and along with this and Norwegian it forms the West Scandinavian languages, the descendant of the western dialects of Old Norse. Danish and Swedish make up the other branch, called the East Scandinavian languages. More recent analysis divides 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.
The vast majority of Icelandic speakers live in Iceland. There are about 8,165 speakers of Icelandic living in Denmark,Statbank Danish statistics of which approximately 3,000 are studentsOfficial Iceland website. The language is also spoken by 5,655 people in the USAMLA Language Map Data Center: Icelandic. Modern Language Association (undated). Retrieved on 2007-04-26. Based on 2000 US census data. and by 2,385 in CanadaCanadian census 2001 (mostly in Gimli, Manitoba). 97% of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongueIcelandic: At Once Ancient And Modern. Icelandic Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (2001). Retrieved on 2007-04-27., but in communities outside Iceland the usage of the language is declining. Extant Icelandic speakers outside Iceland represent recent emigration in almost all cases except Gimli, which was settled from the 1880s onwards.
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 Norden. Retrieved on 2007-04-27.. 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,Nordic Language Convention. Retrieved on 2007-04-27.Nordic Language Convention. Retrieved on 2007-04-27. however the Convention is not very well known and is mostly a recommendation. The countries have committed themselves to providing services in various languages, but citizens have no absolute rights except for criminal and court matters.Language Convention not working properly, Nordic news, March 3, 2007. Retrieved on April 25, 2007.Helge Niska, Community interpreting in Sweden: A short presentation, International Federation of Translators, 2004. Retrieved on April 25, 2007.
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, 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 Icelandic Language DayMenntamálaráðuneyti. Retrieved on 2007-04-27..
Icelandic is a language nearly without dialects.
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 to the U.S. occupation of Iceland during World War II which 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-creation 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. Many Icelanders can also understand the original manuscripts, with a little effort.
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 as 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 "cord" and tölva ("computer") combines tala ("digit; number") and völva ("seeress").
Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See Help:IPA for a pronunciation key.
Unlike many languages, Icelandic has only very minor dialectal differences in sounds. 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 p, t and k become aspirated when they are the first letter of a word; b, d and g do not.
| 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] and [ɣ] are not completely constrictive and are often closer to approximants ([ʋ], [ɹ̪] and [ɰ}] respectively) than fricatives.
| 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 |
A sample extract.
Icelandic retains many grammatical features of other ancient Germanic languages, and resembles Old Norwegian before its inflection was greatly simplified. 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 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. T-V distinction ("þérun") in modern Icelandic seems on the verge of extinction, yet can still be found, especially in structured official address.
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.[vague][citation needed] 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. However, as words are heavily inflected, the word order is fairly flexible.
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 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 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 generally continued to use their traditional name system, which was formerly used in all of Scandinavia.
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 officially adopted in 1929 replacing je,(Icelandic) Hvenær var bókstafurinn \'é\' tekinn upp í íslensku í stað \'je\' og af hverju er \'je\' enn notað í ýmsum orðum? (retrieved on 2007-06-20) and z was officially abolished in 1974.
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. But a few examples are given below.
| English word | Icelandic word | Spoken comparison |
|---|---|---|
| apple | epli | listen |
| book | bók | listen |
| high/hair | hár | listen |
| house | hús | listen |
| mother | móðir | listen |
| night | nótt | listen |
| stone | steinn | listen |
| that | það | listen |
| word | orð | listen |
Many dialects in England have inherited words from the Vikings and are thus the same as in Icelandic. For example, the word laik for "to play" is common across the north of England. In the north-east of England, to gang is used for "to go".
Page 49 from Kvennafræðarinn.
The following is an extract from Kvennafræðarinn (Elín Briem, 1889); a recipe book (page pictured right):
| “ | Smjörið er brætt og hveitið smátt og smátt hrært út í það, þangað til það er gengið upp í smjörið. Síðan er mjólkinni smáhellt út í, og hrært stöðugt í, til þess ekki fari í kekki. Þegar mjólkin er gengin upp og grauturinn orðinn vel jafn og saltið komið í, skal taka hann ofan. Með honum er borin saftblanda eða mjólk, einnig steyttur sykur og kanel. | ” |
Which translates approximately as:
| “ | The butter is melted and the flour stirred into it slowly but surely, until it has blended with the butter. Then the milk is slowly poured in, and stirred constantly, so it doesn’t get lumpy. When the milk has blended well and the porridge has become steady and salt has been added, it should be taken off. It is served with a fruit juice mixture or milk, even stirred sugar and cinnamon. | ” |
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Icelandic language edition of Wiktionary, the free dictionary/thesaurus
Icelandic language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikibooks has a book on the topic of
| Icelandic language | ||
|---|---|---|
| Features | Alphabet · Phonology · Orthography · Grammar · Vocabulary |  |
| Names | Patronymic names · Street names · List of exonyms | |
| History and literature | History · Literature · Proverbs · Sagas · Poetic Edda · Skaldic poetry | |
| Promotion and purism | Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies · Icelandic Language Day · Icelandic Language Council · Icelandic Language Fund · Icelandic Language Institute · Linguistic purism | |
| Related topics | Icelandic Sign Language | |
| Modern Germanic languages |
|---|
| Afrikaans · Alemannic · Danish · Dutch · English · Faroese · Frisian · German · Icelandic · Limburgish · Low German · Luxembourgish · Norwegian · Scots · Swedish · Yiddish |
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