Icelandic language facing extinction

We may actually be seeing a generation growing up without a proper mother tongue. Today almost everyone in Iceland is in almost full-time contact with English

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As much as Icelandic 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.”

What is Lindy doing in Iceland?

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 Eiríkur, 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.

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”, Eiríkur said. “Smartphones didn’t exist 10 years ago. Today almost everyone is in almost full-time contact with English.”

>As much as Icelandic is key to Icelanders’ sense of national and cultural identity, Icelandic is spoken today by barely 340,000 people
i.e. the entire population of iceland

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 Eiríkur 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. As many as 21 European languages are potentially at risk of “digital extinction”, according to research.

Most European languages are unlikely to survive in the digital age, a new study by Europe’s leading Language Technology experts warns.

Weak or non-existent language support
> Icelandic
> Latvian
> Lithuanian
> Maltese

Fragmentary support
> Basque
> Bulgarian
> Catalan
> Greek
> Hungarian
> Polish

Moderate support
> Dutch
> French
> German
> Italian
> Spanish

Good support
> English

>anglo'd
Good. European languages should go extinct.

In what amounts to a perfect storm for such a small language, it is also under siege in the real world. The wild north Atlantic island welcomed almost two million foreign visitors last year, four times the 2008 figure, and immigrants now make up 10% of the population, a five-fold increase in two decades.

Mostly EU workers on short-term contracts in fish-processing or tourism, new residents rarely need to master Icelandic, with its three genders, four cases and six verb forms. In the bars, restaurants and shops of downtown Reykjavík, it can be a struggle for locals to get served in their native language.

“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?” Eiríkur asked.

Online, however, is the biggest concern. Apart from Google – which, mainly because it has an Icelandic engineer, has added Icelandic speech recognition to its Android mobile operating system – the internet giants have no interest in offering Icelandic options for a population the size of Cardiff’s.

“For them, it costs the same to digitally support Icelandic as it does to digitally support French,” Eiríkur said. “Apple, Amazon … If they look at their spreadsheets, they’ll never do it. You can’t make a business case.”

Where Icelandic versions do exist, said Nowenstein, they are not perfect. “You can switch Facebook to Icelandic, but it’s not good at dealing with cases,” she said. “So people get fed up with seeing their names in the wrong grammatical form, and switch back to English.”

Max Naylor, a UK academic also involved in the study, said he had emailed and written to Apple several times but had never received a reply. “We’re not expecting a fully-functioning operating system, but the hope is that they will at least open themselves up to collaboration,” he said.

The Icelandic government is setting aside 450m krónur (£3.1m) a year over the next five years for a language technology fund it hopes will produce open-source materials developers could use, but the challenge – from apps and voice-activated fridges to social media and self-driving cars – is immense.

but english is a european language???

Icelandic has survived almost unscathed for well over 1,000 years, and few experts worry it will die in the very near future. “It remains the majority, official language of a nation state, of education and government,” Nowenstein said.

“But the concern is that it becomes obsolete in more and more domains, its use restricted, so it’s second best in whole areas of people’s lives. Then you worry about Icelanders understanding much less, for example, of their cultural heritage.”

In the meantime, Naylor said, literacy rates among Icelandic children are falling as their vocabulary shrinks.

“You could soon have a situation where Icelanders will be native in neither Icelandic or English,” he said. “When identity is so tied up with language … it’s hard to know what that will mean.”

Other than English is what I meant, obviously.

Icelanders will not start to speak English with one another because it's used in movies, games and stuff. I call bs on this, especially if one regards that Icelandic is as said a more of a culture thing than just a language.

The eternal anglo wins again.

ITT: delusional angloscum

The only problem with this is the fact that English is a shit language.

no one forces you to use english
stop using our websites, enjoying our media, playing our games etc any time

L'anglais est une langue affreuse.
Langt lifa íslensku!

>Moderate support

>> French
>> German
>> Italian
>> Spanish

I doubt any of those languages dissapear in our lifetimes desu

but icelanders icelandify anglo loanwords to an auistic degree. languages like dutch or swedish will go extinct before icelandic does

nuke the english speaking world

...

This is why my blood fucking boils when I hear Maltese people speaking to each other in English.

We should nuke Hollywood.

Dutch isn't going anywhere desu. Even our regional languages aren't going anywhere.

And before English all Dutch people also spoke German. And French before that.

Not anymore, sweetie

>everyone else speaking your language so its no longer special,
Latin should be the international language

>Iceland is full of cucks
nothing new here

Icelandic is going extinct DESPITE the Icelandicization of certain loan words

Unlike most languages, when Icelandic needs a new word it rarely imports one. Instead, enthusiasts coin a new term 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.

there's zero difference between english here or in america no matter how hard yanks desperately pretend otherwise

Iceland is dead in many ways because they are just like the rest of the snowniggers.

youtube.com/watch?v=mKjj_JgKDeI

>hearing kids in my 95% white(a few rich pajeets and such) area using ameriwog and jafacian slang

But that's what will happen if they become used to it. If they are exposed to objects like cellphones more in context likning it to the Word in english, or if they watch more social interactions online in english and participate in them mostly in english then that will be the one that comes most naturally to them. When they try to have conversation in icelandic they will halt and stumble because speaking in icelandic will become something they don't do as often. They will jump over to english for phrases and sentances that they know best in english, and in time that will become the norm. Icelandic won't die, but it won't be peoples day to day means of communication.

>Black people in Britain invent own slang with cockney slang mixed in instead of using African-American slang
>this is evidence to prove America influences our language

how many levels of mong are you on?

their flag had red white and blue
Probably confused them for Frenchmen

>Iceland is dead in many ways because they are just like the rest of the snowniggers.

based

We must annihilate all other languages, but most importantly french

Killing the I*elandic scum in revenge for the cod wars

no you get ameriwog slang like hella and yall being said

We're fucked

humans adapt to the world around them, just use fire already Grugg

>immigrants now make up 10% of the population, a five-fold increase in two decades.
goodbye iceland

They taught their children (((English))) and now wonder where did the native go. It's their fault. They should give up now. Applies to other nordcucks too

in English we use the past perfect for an action in the past that has been completed

>humans adapt to the world around them
What's adaptive about Maltese talking to each other in English?

Please iceland, don't end up like us

is this a culturelet problem?

*smiles from heaven*

It will end up light Welsh, people will still speak it for cultural reasons, but English is the lingua franca. It's not going to die anytime in the next 100 years.

>in principle, multilingualism is obviously a good thing

Hmmm

Eternal support among the patrician tier languages
> Finnish
> Finno-memetic

It's not going to die anytime in the next 100 years

I could actually see the US collapsing within the next 100 years easily and if that happens it's over for the english language I guess.

Irish Gaelic is experiencing a revival though

Our government might collapse, but our cultural influence will still be felt due to shit like Hollywood and Youtube and the UK still has massive influence in the world though media.

A few enthusiasts in college and bored high school kids is not a revival

There’s more fucking NAVAJO Native speakers than Irish

FUCKING NAVAJO

It’s over for the Irish

We purified our language once, well do it again. I can read texts from the 12th century, once I get used to the spelling. But reading texts from the 17th century is harder, especially for those with no command of Danish.

no

iq89

In terms of native speakers yes, but the Navajo are a bit of a special case. Due to shit like code talkers they have a fuck ton of pride in their language and culture. But there are almost no people that speak it as a 2nd language while there are about 2 million people who speak Irish as a second language and growing. I doubt it will ever be the national language of Ireland again, but it will still be used for plenty of artistic purposes.

The fourth one is just around the corner, so be ready to see our boats sail down the Thames

That would be Breizh

I can read texts from the 9th century as well, that's not something overly special.

>expecting an Irish person to actually know about celtic languages
come on France you know better than that

Very jealous.

Pretty sad how their biggest claim to fame isn't even that special. Well, that and shitting over international treaties by remorselessly killing endangered whales.

I didn't make the map
celter than you, nigel

They've stolen me Lucky Charms

>“It’s called ‘digital minoritisation’,”
NO, IT'S CALLED STOP BEING LAZY AND PRODUCE YOUR OWN CULTURE SO PEOPLE WANT TO USE YOUR LANGUAGE.

Brazil is going the same way - the poor and uninformed keep speaking Portuguese, which gets more and more bastardized by these stupid fucks, whereas the more informed just live with English 24/7 on the Internet.

If the country had any investment in actual culture, things wouldn't be that way.

hope iceage don't become too mainstream

Your culture is just women with giant asses and cocaine. I don't think it will be missed

>American education
Just because your country's only culture is nigger music with huge asses, doesn't mean ours is aswell, stop projecting

is it true that 50% of Brazil is a no-go zone?

>“You could soon have a situation where Icelanders will be native in neither Icelandic or English,” he said. “When identity is so tied up with language … it’s hard to know what that will mean.”
Same happens to young Bulgarians. They can't read old books, because they don't know some more archaic words and expressions. They are also not natives in English. But I don't think they should worry about some digital assistants. These things are useless and overhyped by big-tech so that they can enter our home. I can't even come up with a reason to automate my home. It's just a two bedroom apartment. How do you think, do I have to make that many steps to switch the light on?

Only if you are afraid of mosquitoes

A good way to know if a language is in an endargement (or developed) position is the framework developed by M. Paul Lewis and Gary F. Simons.

seems like my superiority has caused some controversy. english is the only language that matters

"In his eyes, the greatest symbiotic parasite the world has ever known isn't microbial, it's linguistic."

and a lot of people in Denmark and Norway, Iceland has one of the highest emigration rates.

how about you tell us about this framework, Pedro?

nips must have one hell of an immune system

I think his point was as simple as
>It could be more, or there could actually be something
Norwegian will survive so long Norway leverages its population, and trade culture with Sweden and Denmark.
Iceland is not in that situation.
BR is in the situation where they actually have the population needed to produce proper culture, but won't do that properly.

>sensationalist media looking for clicks.

Icelandic will go nowhere. They have survived almost full time contact with danish for centuries, even now pretty much every adult speaks danish fluently, before the reformation there was also Latin. Icelandic is still around, the only thing that happens is loanwords come in to the language.

Meh, support for Spanish is as good as for English, arguably better as you get native speakers from South America rather than whatever standards they have on Indian call centers

>Because of the complexity of the interrelated factors to define language endangerment, it is helpful to categorize the vitality of a language using a summary label. Various schemas have been proposed, each with a particular focus. For various reasons, none of these are entirely adequate for a comprehensive global assessment of the state of the world’s languages. The Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale or EGIDS (Lewis and Simons 2010) was developed specifically to fill this gap.

>EGIDS stands for the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale. This is a tool that is used to measure the status of a language in terms of endangerment or development

>The EGIDS consists of 13 levels with each higher number on the scale representing a greater level of disruption to the intergenerational transmission of the language

Level Label Description
0 International The language is widely used between nations in trade, knowledge exchange, and international policy.
1 National The language is used in education, work, mass media, and government at the national level.
2 Provincial The language is used in education, work, mass media, and government within major administrative subdivisions of a nation.
3 Wider Communication The language is used in work and mass media without official status to transcend language differences across a region.
4 Educational The language is in vigorous use, with standardization and literature being sustained through a widespread system of institutionally supported education.
5 Developing The language is in vigorous use, with literature in a standardized form being used by some though this is not yet widespread or sustainable.
6a Vigorous The language is used for face-to-face communication by all generations and the situation is sustainable.
6b Threatened The language is used for face-to-face communication within all generations, but it is losing users.
7 Shifting The child-bearing generation can use the language among themselves, but it is not being transmitted to children.
8a Moribund The only remaining active users of the language are members of the grandparent generation and older.
8b Nearly Extinct The only remaining users of the language are members of the grandparent generation or older who have little opportunity to use the language.
9 Dormant The language serves as a reminder of heritage identity for an ethnic community, but no one has more than symbolic proficiency.
10 Extinct The language is no longer used and no one retains a sense of ethnic identity associated with the language.

The Norwegian language changed radically after the Black Death had ravaged the country, and Norway entered its position as a vassal state.
All this, merely because Danes used Danish priests speaking Danish, changed the language.
There is another example: The more spoken version of Samiì is replacing the less spoken languages, because its what is taught properly in school. Which means once the children are age 7-8, their native one is basically dying, because there is nowhere to speak it.

For Icelandic, the scenario is not as bleak. Its possible to unfuck a lot of it by producing reasonable TV series, meaning kids have something to watch in their language.
Time will show if the youth trend will destroy their language, or if its merely a phase of Youtube Entertainment

the americanization of the world is truly disgusting

lingv.ro/RRL 2 2010 art01Lewis.pdf

Really sad desu

>Win Cold war
>Internet age follows
>Destroy the worlds culture
>Risk being irrelevant as a nation due little effort to stay as top dog

Here's a list of the top 10 German children TV shows. All are American or Japanese.

> The Weekend Kids
> The Dinos
> Digimon
> Kickers
> Pokemon
> Recess
> Detective Conan
> Dragonball
> Dragonball Z

youtube.com/watch?v=9aJCJ7oS_lo

There are more children speaking Lithuanian to each other in Iceland than English.

>Polish
>unlikely to survive
>the second language of the entire British Isles, Germany, and like half of Scandinavia
Internet won't achieve what decades of forced germanization and polonization didn't manage to do
We're like cockroaches

>polonization
Lel, I meant russification. I should get some sleep.

Norway gets it.

A hundred years ago Brazil was still a huge Franceboo and the more elite people created a lot of classy stuff trying to be intellectual.

But systematic corruption and, more recently, affirmative action have drained any will to be a creative mind in this shithole, you either work a soulless job to make money or go to a more art-oriented country, where you'll find the audience for the price of being a deserter.

>In the year 2015, 1,488 book titles were published in Iceland in printed format. Notwithstanding annual fluctuations, the number of books published has almost remained constant since around the turn of the century. In the period 1999-2015, 1,597 books were published on average per annum

>Most of the publications are works originally written in Icelandic. In 2015, seven of every ten books were works written in Icelandic. Six out of every ten translations were translations from English. Translations from other languages were much fewer.

WORDS THAT KILL

STANDING

lol what makes you think the poles living in those places are gonna keep the language