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Icelandic () 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 . CLASSIFICATION Icelandic is an Indo-European Language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic Language s. It is the closest living relative of Faroese and along with this and Norwegian it forms the West Scandinavian languages, the descendant of the western dialects of Old Norse . Danish and Swedish make up the other branch, called the East Scandinavian languages. More recent analysis divides the North Germanic languages into insular Scandinavian and continental Scandinavian languages, grouping Norwegian with Danish and Swedish based on Mutual Intelligibility and the fact that Norwegian has been heavily influenced by East Scandinavian (particularly Danish) during the last millennium and has diverged considerably from both Faroese and Icelandic. GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION The vast majority of Icelandic speakers hail from 1 Based on 2000 US Census Data . and by 2,385 in , Manitoba ). 97% of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongue2, 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. Iceland is the only territory where Icelandic enjoys Official status. It is also the only official language of the country. Though Iceland is a member of the Nordic Council , the Council uses only Danish , Norwegian and Swedish as its working languages, though it publishes material in Icelandic 3. Under the Nordic Language Convention , since 1987, citizens of Iceland have the opportunity to use Icelandic when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable to any interpretation or translation costs. The Convention covers visits to hospitals, job centres, the police and social security offices45. 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 , made up of representatives of universities, the arts, journalists, teachers, and the Ministry of Culture, Science and Education, advises the authorities on Language Policy . The Icelandic Language Fund supports activities intended to promote the Icelandic language. Since 1995 , November 16 each year, the birthday of 19th century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson is celebrated as Icelandic Language Day 6. Icelandic is a language nearly without Dialect s. 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 Saga s 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 American 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 Edda s 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. Linguistic purism During the 18th century, the Icelandic authorities implemented a stringent policy of Linguistic Purism . As a result of this policy, some writers and terminologists were put in charge of the creation of new vocabulary to adapt the Icelandic language to the evolution of new concepts, and thus not having to resort to borrowed Neologism s as in many other languages. Many old words that had fallen into misuse were updated to fit in with the modern language, and neologisms were created from Old Norse roots. For example, the word ''rafmagn'' ("electricity"), literally means "amber power" from Greek ''elektron'' (" Amber "), similarly the word ''sími'' ("telephone") originally meant "cord" and ''tölva'' ("computer") combines ''tala'' ("digit; number") and ''völva'' ("seeress"). PHONOLOGY See Also: Icelandic phonology Unlike many languages, Icelandic has only very minor Dialect al differences in sounds. The language has both Monophthong s and Diphthong s, and consonants can be Voiced or Unvoiced . Voice plays a big role in the Pronunciation of many Consonant s. For most Icelandic consonants, there are voiced and unvoiced counterparts. However, ''b'', ''d'', and ''g'' are never voiced in Icelandic. These letters only differ from ''p'', ''t'' and ''k'' because ''p'', ''t'' and ''k'' become Aspirated when they are the first letter of a word; ''b'', ''d'' and ''g'' do not. Consonants The voiced fricatives , and are not completely constrictive and are often closer to approximants than fricatives. Vowels Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right of the dot represents a rounded vowel. GRAMMAR Icelandic retains many and Weak Noun s, which are furthermore divided in smaller paradigms for declension, according to many criteria (sound-shifts, consonant clusters etc.) Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in the four cases, and for number in the singular and plural. T-V Distinction ("þérun") in modern Icelandic seems on the verge of extinction, yet can still be found, especially in structured official address. Singular Present . Some Icelandic Infinitive s end with the ''-ja'' Suffix . For many verbs that require an Object , a Reflexive Pronoun can be used instead. The case of the pronoun depends on the case that the verb governs. The basic Word Order in Icelandic is Subject-verb-object , but because of how diverse the inflection of words is, the word order is fairly flexible. VOCABULARY Early Icelandic vocabulary was largely for example brought many words related to the Court and Knight ship; words in the Semantic Field of Trade and Commerce have been borrowed from Low German because of trade connections. In the late 18th century, Language Purism started to gain noticeable ground in Iceland; since the early 19th century, language purism has been the linguistic policy in the country (see Linguistic Purism In Icelandic ). Nowadays, it is common practice to Coin new compound words from Icelandic derivatives. Icelandic Name s differ from most Western Family Name systems by being Patronymic (and sometimes Matronymic ) in that they reflect the immediate father (or mother) of the child and not the historic family lineage. Iceland shares a common cultural heritage with the Scandinavia n countries of Norway , Sweden , and Denmark . Icelanders, unlike other Scandinavians, have generally continued to use their traditional name system, which was formerly used in all of Scandinavia. WRITING SYSTEM See Also: Icelandic alphabet Icelandic orthography The Icelandic alphabet is notable for its retention of two old letters which no longer exist in the (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: It should be noted that Accented Letters , such as ''á'' and ''ö'', are considered to be separate letters and not variants of their derivative vowels. The letter ''é'' was officially adopted in 1929 replacing ''je'', Hvenær var bókstafurinn 'é' tekinn upp í íslensku í stað 'je' og af hverju er 'je' enn notað í ýmsum orðum? (retrieved on 2007-06-20) and ''z'' was officially abolished in 1974. COGNATES WITH ENGLISH As Icelandic shares its ancestry with English , there are some Cognate words in both languages; each have the same or a similar meaning and are derived from a common root. Phonological and Orthographical changes in each of the languages will have changed Spelling and Pronunciation . But a few examples are given below. EXAMPLES The following is an extract from ''Kvennafræðarinn'' (Elín Briem, 1889); a recipe book (page pictured right): Which translates approximately as: SEE ALSO REFERENCES BIBLIOGRAPHY EXTERNAL LINKS General
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