Icelandic introduction

From UniLang Wiki

Overview

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 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.

The vast majority of Icelandic speakers hail from Iceland. There are about 8,165 speakers of Icelandic living in Denmark, of which approximately 3,000 are students. The language is also spoken by 5,655 people in the USA and by 2,385 in Canada (mostly in Gimli, Manitoba). 97% of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongue, 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 1880's onwards.

History

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 The same applied to the U.S. occupation of Iceland during World War II which was gradually withdrawn in the 1950s.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.

Influences of other languages

Many terms of Latin origin are present in Icelandic. The terms are present in all the other Germanic languages, e.g. skrifa (German schreiben, Dutch schrijven, Latin scribere), lesa (German lesen, Dutch lezen, Latin legere) etc.