Icelandic

Why the sagas are still readable

The oldest texts date from around 1100, many of them poetry and laws once kept orally, and the sagas of Icelanders were written from the 12th century on. Their language, Old Icelandic, was a western dialect of Old Norse. Danish rule from 1536 to 1918 left Icelandic in daily use and changed it little. Pronunciation did shift between the 12th and 16th centuries, mostly in the vowels, but written Icelandic has changed little apart from new vocabulary. The line between old and modern Icelandic is conventionally drawn at 1540.

Who designed the spelling

The alphabet follows a 19th-century standard set mainly by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask. He rebuilt it on the First Grammatical Treatise, a 12th-century work by an anonymous author, with changes such as k in place of c, and he brought back archaic letters such as ð. The letter é officially replaced je in 1929, and z gave way to s in 1974. Þ and ð write the th sounds of thin and this, and æ is pronounced like the vowel of English ride.

How new words are made

Purism has been national policy since the early 19th century. In 1589 Bishop Oddur Einarsson wrote that the language had kept its purity since the old literature, and in the 18th century translators coined many loan-translations. Today new terms, especially for science and technology, are usually compounds of Icelandic words, and many speakers use foreign words freely in speech but avoid them in writing. Christianity had brought words from other Scandinavian languages, such as kirkja, church, while French lent words of court and chivalry and Low German those of trade.

What the names mean

Most Icelanders still carry a patronymic or a matronymic in place of a family name: the father's or mother's name in the genitive plus -son or -dóttir. Changes announced in 2019 allow people registered as non-binary to use -bur, child of. Since 1995, 16 November, the birthday of the poet Jónas Hallgrímsson, has been Icelandic Language Day.