Icelandic Language

Its closest relatives are Faroese and West Norwegian dialects such as Sognamål.

While most West 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.

Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages.

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.

Icelandic is a language nearly without dialects.

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 sagas 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 The same applied to the U.S. occupation of Iceland during World War II which was gradually withdrawn in the 1950s.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.

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. 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 Eddas that were written some eight hundred years ago.

Icelandic retains many grammatical features of other ancient Germanic languages, and resembles Old Norwegian before its inflection was greatly simplified.

Modern Icelandic is still a heavily inflected language with four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Icelandic nouns can have one of three grammatical genders —masculine, feminine or neuter.

There are two main declension paradigms for each gender: strong and weak nouns, 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.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are three voices: active, passive and middle; but it may be debated whether the middle voice is a voice or simply an independent class of verbs of its own.

Icelandic names 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 Scandinavian 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.

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