Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

rooted in the tongue’s ancient Norse past: a neologism that looks, sounds and behaves like Icelandic.

The Icelandic word for computer, for example, is tölva, a marriage of tala, which means number, and völva, prophetess. A web browser is vafri, derived from the verb to wander. Podcast is hlaðvarp, something you “charge” and “throw”.

This makes Icelandic quite special, a language whose complex grammar remains much as it was a millennium ago and whose vocabulary is unadulterated, but which is perfectly comfortable coping with concepts as 21st-century as a touchscreen.

How Iceland became the bitcoin miners’ paradise

But as old, pure and inventive as it may be, as much as it is key to Icelanders’ sense of national and cultural identity, Icelandic is spoken today by barely 340,000 people - and Siri and Alexa are not among them.

In an age of Facebook, YouTube and Netflix, smartphones, voice recognition and digital personal assistants, the language of the Icelandic sagas – written on calfskin between AD1200 and 1300 – is sinking in an ocean of English.

“It’s called ‘digital minoritisation’,” said Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, a professor of Icelandic language and linguistics at the University of Iceland. “When a majority language in the real world becomes a minority language in the digital world.”

Secondary school teachers already report 15-year-olds holding whole playground conversations in English, and much younger children tell language specialists they “know what the word is” for something they are being shown on the flashcard, but not in Icelandic.

Because young Icelanders in particular now spend such a large part of their lives in an almost entirely English digital world, said Rögnvaldsson, they are no longer getting the input they need to build a strong base in the grammar and vocabulary of their native tongue. “We may actually be seeing a generation growing up without a proper mother tongue,” he said.

An Icelandic fisherman with his mobile phone.
An Icelandic fisherman with his mobile phone. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
The language has survived major foreign inputs in the past, under Danish rule for example. The impact of English, however, “is unique in scale of impact, intensity of contact, speed of change”, Rögnvaldsson said. “Smartphones didn’t exist 10 years ago. Today almost everyone is in almost full-time contact with English.”

The range and volume of English readily accessible to Icelanders has expanded exponentially, most of it more relevant and more engrossing than ever before, said Iris Edda Nowenstein, a PhD student working with Rögnvaldsson on an exhaustive three-year study of the impact of digital language contact on 5,000 people.

“Once, outside school you’d do sport, learn an instrument, read, watch the same TV, play the same computer games,” she said. “Now on phones, tablets, computers, TVs, there are countless games, films, series, videos, songs. You converse with Google Home or Alexa. All in English.”

English may not be the enemy – in principle, multilingualism is obviously a good thing – but its sheer weight and variety online are overwhelming, Nowenstein said. Nor is Icelandic alone, according to research.

Icelandic’s relatively few speakers are also unusually proficient in English and enthusiastic early adopters of new technology. “The obvious worry is that young people will start to say: ‘Okay, so we can’t use this language abroad. If we’re not using it much in Iceland either, then what’s the point?” Rögnvaldsson asked.