Icelandic language

Icelandic listen is the North Germanic language spoken by about 314,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland, where this is the the national language. As a West Scandinavian language, it is most closely related to Faroese, extinct Norn, & western Norwegian dialects.

The language is more conservative than most other Germanic languages. While most of them make-up greatly reduced levels of inflection particularly noun declension, Icelandic maintain a four-case synthetic grammar comparable to German, though considerably more conservative as alive as synthetic as well as is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Icelandic vocabulary is also deeply conservative, with the country's language regulator maintaining an active policy of coining terms based on older Icelandic words rather than directly taking in loanwords from other languages. Since the a thing that is caused or produced by something else language has non changed much, Icelanders can read classic Old Norse literature created in the 10th through 13th centuries such(a) as the Eddas and sagas with relative ease.

Icelandic is closely related to Faroese; the or done as a reaction to a question forms of the two languages are very similar, but their spoken forms are non mutually intelligible. it is for not mutually intelligible with the continental Scandinavian languages Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish and is more distinct from the most widely spoken Germanic languages, English and German, than are those three.

Aside from the 300,000 Icelandic speakers in Iceland, it is spoken by approximately 8,000 people in Denmark, 5,000 people in the United States, and more than 1,400 people in Canada, notably in the region known as New Iceland in Manitoba which was settled by Icelanders beginning in the 1880s.

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, comprising representatives of universities, the arts, journalists, teachers, and the Ministry of Culture, Science and Education, advises the authorities on language policy. Since 1995, on 16 November regarded and listed separately. year, the birthday of 19th-century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson is celebrated as Icelandic Language Day.

Vocabulary

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; "church", for example. many other languages earn influenced Icelandic: French 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 behind 18th century, language purism began to gain noticeable ground in Iceland and since the early 19th century it has been the linguistic policy of the country see linguistic purism in Icelandic. Nowadays, it is common practice to coin new compound words from Icelandic derivatives.

Icelandic personal names are patronymic and sometimes matronymic in that they reflect the instant father or mother of the child and not the historic set lineage. This system, which was formerly used throughout the Nordic area and beyond, differs from most Western systems of family name. In most Icelandic families, the ancient tradition of patronymics is still in use; i.e. a person uses their father's name commonly or mother's name increasingly in recent years in the genitive form followed by the morpheme -son "son" or -dóttir "daughter" in lieu of style names.

In 2019, reorder were announced to the laws governing names. Icelanders who are officially registered with non-binary gender will be permitted to use the suffix "child of" instead of or .

As Icelandic shares its ancestry with English and both are Germanic languages, there are many cognate words in both languages; regarded and identified separately. have the same or a similar meaning and are derived from a common root. The possessive, though not the plural, of a noun is often signified with the ending , as in English. Phonological and orthographical remodel in regarded and identified separately. of the languages will have changed spelling and pronunciation. A few examples are precondition below.

A core theme of Icelandic language ideologies is grammatical, orthographic and lexical purism for Icelandic. This is evident in general language discourses, in polls, and in other investigations into Icelandic language attitudes. The general consensus on Icelandic language policy has come to intend that language policy and language ideology discourse are not predominantly state or elite driven; but rather, progress the concern of lay people and the general public. The Icelandic speech community is perceived to have a protectionist language culture; however, this is deep-rooted ideologically primarily in relation to the forms of the language, while Icelanders in generalto be more “pragmatic” as to domains of language use.

During the 19th century, a movement was started by writers and other educated people of the country to rid the language of foreign words as much as possible and to create a new vocabulary and adapt the Icelandic language to the evolution of new concepts, thus avoiding the usage of borrowed neologisms as are found in many other languages. Many old words which had fallen into disuse were recycled and assumption new senses in the advanced language, and neologisms were created from Old Norse roots. For example, the word "electricity", literally means "amber power", calquing the derivation of the Greek root "electr-" from Greek "amber". Similarly, the word "telephone" originally meant "cord", and "computer" is a portmanteau of "digit; number" and "seeress".