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Icelandic (íslenska) is a North Germanic language, the official language of Iceland and the mother tongue of the Icelandic people. Its closest relative is Faroese and can be somewhat understood by a small number of Norwegians as well, depending on their dialect and education. While most Western European languages have reduced greatly the extent of inflection, particularly in noun declension, Icelandic retains an inflectional grammar comparable to that of Latin, Ancient Greek, or more closely, Old Norse and Old English. Written Icelandic has 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. This old form of the language is called Old Icelandic, but also commonly equated to Old Norse, an umbrella term also known as "Danish Tongue" used for the common Scandinavian language of the Viking era. Old Icelandic was, in the strict sense of the term, a dialect of Old Norse with some Celtic influence. 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: The preservation of the Icelandic language is taken seriously by Icelanders — rather than borrow foreign words for new concepts, new Icelandic words are diligently forged for public use. Icelandic does not have any notable dialect differences.
Phonology Icelandic has an aspiration contrast between plosives, rather than a voicing contrast, something relatively rare among European languages. Preaspirated voiceless stops are also common. However fricative and sonorant consonant phonemes exhibit regular contrasts in voice, including in nasals (rare in the world's languages). Additionally, length is contrastive for many phonemes; voiceless sonorant consonants seem to be the only exception. The chart below is based on Scholten (2000, p. 22); refer to the IPA article for information on the sounds of the following symbols: Consonants The voiced fricatives , , and are not completely constrictive and are often closer to approximants than fricatives. The status of and as phonemes or as allophones of and is the topic of some debate. On the one hand, the presence of minimal pairs like gjóla "light wind" vs. góla "howl" and kjóla "dresses" vs. kóla "cola" suggests that the palatal stops are separate phonemes. On the other hand, only the palatal stops, not the velars, may appear before front vowels, and some linguists (e.g. Rögnvaldsson 1993) have held out for an underlying phonemic representation of and as and respectively, with a phonological process merging the into . Whether this approach, which is consistent with the orthography and historical processes, represents a synchronic reality is disputed. The dental fricatives and are allophones of a single phoneme. is used word-initially, as in þak "roof", and before a voiceless consonant, as in maðkur "worm". is used intervocalically, as in iða "vortex" and word-finally, as in bað "bath", although it can be devoiced to before pause. The phoneme actually represents a voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative or when voiced. Of the voiceless nasals, only occurs in word-initial position, for example in hné "knee". Recently, there has been an increasing tendency, especially among children, to pronounce this as voiced; for example pronouncing hnífur "knife" rather than standard . The palatal nasal appears before palatal stops and the velar nasals before velar stops. appears also before and through the deletion of in the consonant clusters and . The preaspirates (e.g. löpp "foot") do not occur in initial position. In most analyses, consonant length is seen as phonemic while vowel length is seen as determined entirely by environment. Measurements of segment length reveal a more complex picture. Vowels Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right of the dot represents a rounded vowel. Vowel length is predictable in Icelandic (Orešnik and Pétursson 1977). Stressed vowels (both monophthongs and diphthongs) are long: Before other consonant clusters (including the preaspirated stops and geminate consonants), stressed vowels are short. Unstressed vowels are always short. Grammar Icelandic is an inflected language with four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Icelandic nouns can have one of three grammatical genders - masculine, feminine or neuter. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in the four cases, in singular and plural. Morphology Many German speakers will find Icelandic morphology familiar. Almost every morphological category in one language is represented in the other. Nouns are declined for case, number and gender, adjectives for case, number, gender and comparison, and there are two declensions for adjectives, weak and strong. Icelandic possesses only the definite article, which can stand on its own, or be attached to its modified noun (as in other North Germanic languages). Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are three voices: active, passive and medial; but it may be debated whether the medial voice is a voice or simply an independent class of verbs of its own. There are only two simple tenses, past and present, but to make up for that there are a number of auxiliary constructions, some of which may be regarded as tenses, others as aspects to varying degrees. Nouns Icelandic nouns are much like Old Norse, both in form and inflection. They declinate in four cases (Nominative, Accusative, Dative and Genitive) and vary in gender (Masculine, Feminine or Neuter) and number (Singular and Plural). There are two main declension paradigms for each gender: Strong and Weak nouns, that are furthemore divided in smaller paradigms for declension, according to many criteria (sound-shifts, consonant clusters etc.) Syntax Icelandic is SVO (subject-verb-object), generally speaking, with the subject and verb switched in questions and when a sentence begins with an adverb. However, the inflectional system allows for considerable freedom in word order. Icelandic sign language Main article: Icelandic Sign Language Icelandic sign language was originally based on Danish Sign Language. Until 1910, deaf Icelandic people were sent to school in Denmark. Today, Icelandic sign language has evolved apart from its Danish roots. The language is regulated by a national committee. See also | ||||||||
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