Imminent language death of Icelandic

[vegfarandi]

I mentioned this here off topic but I think Icelandic is under serious threat of going extinct in a generation or two.

For context, I live in the US now. But when I go back and see children speaking one-on-one, they generally do not speak Icelandic. They still use Icelandic to speak to adults and their parents, but their private world is English. The major contributor here I think is YouTube, and to a lesser extent smartphone/smart home technology in general. I think this is a very recent phenomenon and affects children born in this decade only.

Without any kind of empirical research, I also think that fluent Icelandic is becoming a bit of a prestige marker, and I see a marked difference in the way that politicians and "important people" speak and write vs. everyday Icelanders, who tend to have much worse spelling, grammar and vocabulary. You see this in the media and in internet discourse, particularly on Facebook.

I worry that this increasingly limited scope of usefulness is an indicator of imminent language death. People have sounded this alarm hundreds of times in the past, but this time I actually think it's very real, and for the first time, the response seems to be the meekest ever. People, and the government, do not seem to care.

It saddens me, and makes me feel guilty, as I also use English for most of my communication nowadays, living outside the country. Wondering if you guys have other examples of this happening or possibly reassuring thoughts.

[sangi39]

I mentioned this here off topic but I think Icelandic is under serious threat of going extinct in a generation or two.

For context, I live in the US now. But when I go back and see children speaking one-on-one, they generally do not speak Icelandic. They still use Icelandic to speak to adults and their parents, but their private world is English. The major contributor here I think is YouTube, and to a lesser extent smartphone/smart home technology in general. I think this is a very recent phenomenon and affects children born in this decade only.

Without any kind of empirical research, I also think that fluent Icelandic is becoming a bit of a prestige marker, and I see a marked difference in the way that politicians and "important people" speak and write vs. everyday Icelanders, who tend to have much worse spelling, grammar and vocabulary. You see this in the media and in internet discourse, particularly on Facebook.

I worry that this increasingly limited scope of usefulness is an indicator of imminent language death. People have sounded this alarm hundreds of times in the past, but this time I actually think it's very real, and for the first time, the response seems to be the meekest ever. People, and the government, do not seem to care.

It saddens me, and makes me feel guilty, as I also use English for most of my communication nowadays, living outside the country. Wondering if you guys have other examples of this happening or possibly reassuring thoughts.

I've only ever visited Iceland once, last year, for two weeks, but from what I saw, at least people around my age (so 20s and early 30s), Icelandic was the first means they'd use to communicate, switching to English if they figured out that the person they were talking to didn't speak Icelandic (and then back to Icelandic again if they turned round to talk to a friend). There were entire sections of conversation I couldn't understand at Eistnaflug when the Icelandic people we met there started talking with each other, then to English when the conversation included us.

I didn't overhear too many children while I was there, but it was mostly in Icelandic when I did. I'm not sure how good there Icelandic actually was, but it was still Icelandic.

As for "everyday Icelanders, who tend to have much worse spelling, grammar and vocabulary. You see this in the media and in internet discourse, particularly on Facebook", I think that's also true of English (I work with someone who I chat with regularly on Facebook, and the way they write sometimes can be truly atrocious). I suppose, though, that's down to context. A chat on Facebook doesn't need to be perfect, while a political speech probably should be pretty spot on.

Then again, we basically just speak English. In Iceland, almost everyone I met spoke near flawless English as well, so you're contending with widespread bilingualism (I guess at least in Reykjavík).

[xxx]

Without any kind of empirical research, I also think that fluent Icelandic is becoming a bit of a prestige marker, and I see a marked difference in the way that politicians and "important people" speak and write vs. everyday Icelanders, who tend to have much worse spelling, grammar and vocabulary. You see this in the media and in internet discourse, particularly on Facebook.

this property is an important survivor device...
when the elites drop out their national language for giving prestige to another the problem is bigger...
the us English penetration by soft power of technology and culture is not accidental, that is a smart purpose since cold war (with massive state subventions...)
Any language suffers by it, but it is not sure the ways it used (globalization, liberalism,...) cannot be used by outsiders languages with new economics power...

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

But when I go back and see children speaking one-on-one, they generally do not speak Icelandic. They still use Icelandic to speak to adults and their parents, but their private world is English. The major contributor here I think is YouTube, and to a lesser extent smartphone/smart home technology in general. I think this is a very recent phenomenon and affects children born in this decade only.

I am not aware of how things are in Iceland, but the use of a language is mostly defined by whom you communicate with. I have seen this with myself, as when my surroundings were English, my French was generally bad; my surroundings being now mostly French in Quebec since I turned 7 over 25 years ago, my English has tanked. However, because I can easily surround myself with English content as a lot is available in it, my English has not tanked as badly as my French had when I used to live in Rest-Of-Canada.

This last point has probably a huge influence in what you witnessed in your birth country. I wouldn't be surprised if the content the current youth is exposed to among themselves due the availability of YouTube and other content was mostly in English. If we think that about there's about 1,25% of a certain year of age in a population, Icelandic youth between 10 and 20 would be about 36,000~45,000 (I mistakenly first calculated 12,500~13000) teens. Not many people to create original local content.

I see that here in French Quebec, despite the population being twenty times larger. Rather than go for original local content, they go for the ten times larger English content. The posts I see from my FrQc Facebook friends are mostly English. I actually see more Portuguese than French in my feed, despite the former forming a much smaller group, them being simply a small part of my Esperanto friendships. (European French, while readily understood, does not have the impact or importance that outsiders would expect. That's because European French slang is so different from what is used here, the memes' impact fails to reach the average FrQcker. Compounded with the consumption and wide availability of English memes, it turns the Pond into a stronger barrier than panfrancophones might hope for.)

I don't think smartphones themselves have much impact, unless there are no Icelandic environments available on iOS or Android, social media and their tools have much more impact.

But before I finish, here's a question. How's their English? Is it full of idiosyncrasies, like the obvious strong French accent I see here in French Quebeckers speaking English, or those it sound and seem English-like? (In Quebec, at least, most youth still use French among themselves. So things are different.)

However, in regards to Icelandic, I had my first shock when I saw there was no Icelandic version of a certain report on the Icelandic banking crisis. I saw this as the first clue that Icelandic had reached a point where uselessness started to appear.

[Vijay]

Now you know how I feel about Malayalam, vegfarandi.

I don't think either language will die out quite that soon, and at least parents haven't stopped passing the language down altogether yet, but I still think you have a valid reason to be concerned in more or less the same way that I'm concerned about Malayalees attaching little or no value to their own language (and constantly using English, at all ages).

[Pabappa]

Minor correction, Yiuel, i think you're off by a factor of ten. 100k is small but 10k would be really tiny, comparable to Sámi.

[Nooj]

I think you are being alarmist, and talk of imminent language death is frankly absurd when I live in a country (Australia) where the vast majority of the indigenous languages are literally going to disappear within a couple of decades as the last speakers are elderly. That's what imminent language death looks like.

Iceland is a nation-state, with all the resources that entails, it has a huge number of speakers in comparison to the languages spoken here and as far as I'm aware, intergenerational transmission is still strong, pace your anecdotal personal experience. Our healthiest traditional languages have around 1000-2000 speakers.

If you're that worried, do something about it. Lobby your politicians, raise a fuss in the media, create an associative network for young people to use Icelandic etc.

[vegfarandi]

But before I finish, here's a question. How's their English? Is it full of idiosyncrasies, like the obvious strong French accent I see here in French Quebeckers speaking English, or those it sound and seem English-like? (In Quebec, at least, most youth still use French among themselves. So things are different.)

The kids I've seen pretty much sound like native-born Americans. The only way I've been able to be sure they're Icelandic is they'll throw in a perfectly pronounced Icelandic name like "Styrkár" or "Þorgerður" and it's clear they're bilingual.

I think you are being alarmist, and talk of imminent language death is frankly absurd when I live in a country (Australia) where the vast majority of the indigenous languages are literally going to disappear within a couple of decades as the last speakers are elderly. That's what imminent language death looks like.

Iceland is a nation-state, with all the resources that entails, it has a huge number of speakers in comparison to the languages spoken here and as far as I'm aware, intergenerational transmission is still strong, pace your anecdotal personal experience. Our healthiest traditional languages have around 1000-2000 speakers.

For sure I am, and Icelanders in general always are, but this situation with the young kids is a really new development. It seems like the youngest generation is not finding Icelandic to be truly useful – the first sign of rejection. Add to this the fact that operating systems and major internet platform are not available in Icelandic, smart home devices do not understand Icelandic (meaning you speak to your appliances in a non-native language, and that all of this is just accelerating. Within ten years we'll probably be speaking to our cars, our washing machines and our vaccuum cleaners and when your own home is no longer in your native language, it has really lost usefulness. The home is usually the last place for a language to die.

[TurkeySloth]

The kids I've seen pretty much sound like native-born Americans. The only way I've been able to be sure they're Icelandic is they'll throw in a perfectly pronounced Icelandic name like "Styrkár" or "Þorgerður" and it's clear they're bilingual.

Not gonna try "Styrkár" cause nothing jumps right out at me. However, my guesses for "Þorgerður" are [θorgərður] and [θorgɛrður]. I'll be very surprised if they're in the ball park because this is the first time I've seen the name. The only "cheating," if you wanna call it that, I did was seeing if *r can be trilled. Even if it can't have been trilled, I'd have still used [r] and specified it as the trill.

[Nooj]

For sure I am, and Icelanders in general always are, but this situation with the young kids is a really new development. It seems like the youngest generation is not finding Icelandic to be truly useful – the first sign of rejection. Add to this the fact that operating systems and major internet platform are not available in Icelandic, smart home devices do not understand Icelandic (meaning you speak to your appliances in a non-native language, and that all of this is just accelerating. Within ten years we'll probably be speaking to our cars, our washing machines and our vaccuum cleaners and when your own home is no longer in your native language, it has really lost usefulness. The home is usually the last place for a language to die.

Operating systems and major internet platforms not being available in Icelandic is easily (if not cheaply) fixable. Iceland is a first world nation, it is in no way condemned to 'digital death'.

I don't believe that not having your internet browser available in Icelandic will lead to the death of Icelandic, given that there are thousands of languages for which this is also true, and yet they maintain language transmission. What you're describing might conceivably lead to a diglossic situation where English is used as a language for certain domains and Icelandic for others, but that does not in and of itself entail language death.

I don't see the situation in Iceland changing, barring some major event, like receiving massive waves of permanently residing Brits for example. That could tip the balance like French speaking Protestants who made their way to Geneva and Frenchified it.

[zompist]

Veg, when you talk about children not speaking Icelandic among themselves, what age are you talking about? 3, 8, 13?

Also, if they're old enough, ask them why they speak English. It'd be interesting to know why they do.

I'm a little skeptical about blaming the media... millions of people hear other languages/dialects in the media without abandoning their home language. But that's also why I ask about age. I can see 13-year-olds speaking English to be cool, but 3-year-olds shouldn't care.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Minor correction, Yiuel, i think you're off by a factor of ten. 100k is small but 10k would be really tiny, comparable to Sámi.

Oh Ir Ezis, I forgot something somewhere. But still, it can't be much more than 40k youth for the current size of Iceland's population. I will amend my post accordingly.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

But before I finish, here's a question. How's their English? Is it full of idiosyncrasies, like the obvious strong French accent I see here in French Quebeckers speaking English, or those it sound and seem English-like? (In Quebec, at least, most youth still use French among themselves. So things are different.)

The kids I've seen pretty much sound like native-born Americans. The only way I've been able to be sure they're Icelandic is they'll throw in a perfectly pronounced Icelandic name like "Styrkár" or "Þorgerður" and it's clear they're bilingual.

Well, this means that Iceland is one step further than French Quebec, but still not yet to the level of French Ontario or Southern Acadia, where their French is highly English-tainted.

Here, zompist's question of how old they are becomes relevant. It can be an image thing. Then again, it may not be: French Quebec gamers tend to talk about much of their gaming in English since their gaming, tabletop or video, is usually done in English.

However, I will not share Mooj concern about you being alarmist. Languages are never "safe", and language death does start somewhere. French Ontario, a population of around 350,000 people, in a supposedly bilingual country, are in state since the sixties where they are constantly losing speakers to English. I could have been one of them. Unlike Iceland, they don't have much autonomy (recent issues shed much light on how much powerless they are as a minority), but still French should be widely used enough for them not to switch. Well, not the case.

I'm a little skeptical about blaming the media... millions of people hear other languages/dialects in the media without abandoning their home language. But that's also why I ask about age. I can see 13-year-olds speaking English to be cool, but 3-year-olds shouldn't care.

The question is not hearing or listening to stuff in a foreign language. The question is only hearing about some subjects in said foreign language. When playing D&D, I can hardly get myself to call my stats force, dextérité, constitution, intelligence, sagesse, charisme. I've played more RPGs in Japanese than in French. When you've never heard of something in language X, it's really hard to discuss it in X without a lot of translation efforts.

[zompist]

When playing D&D, I can hardly get myself to call my stats force, dextérité, constitution, intelligence, sagesse, charisme. I've played more RPGs in Japanese than in French. When you've never heard of something in language X, it's really hard to discuss it in X without a lot of translation efforts.

That's a great point... I'm not sure that watching Youtube videos would make you want to speak English with your friends. But playing games online is different, and a new thing historically. That could well be a big factor!

[Salmoneus]

When playing D&D, I can hardly get myself to call my stats force, dextérité, constitution, intelligence, sagesse, charisme. I've played more RPGs in Japanese than in French. When you've never heard of something in language X, it's really hard to discuss it in X without a lot of translation efforts.

That's a great point... I'm not sure that watching Youtube videos would make you want to speak English with your friends. But playing games online is different, and a new thing historically. That could well be a big factor!

To spell it out: as well as creating a context in which only the lingua franca is used, the internet also acts simply to directly connect people who are not geographically connected. Small communities that have maintained bizarre folk traditions - whether that's a religious ritual, a strange sense of fashion, or the habit of speaking Icelandic - do so in part because they are isolated from the wider world. The internet can end that isolation. Broadcasting, including online broadcasting, like youtube, is powerful - but even more powerful are things like gaming and forum use, which elicit the lingua franca, rather than simply providing it. Ironically, this new power can work in reverse to usual patterns of isolation - the more isolated you are in geographical life, the more dependent you can become on your digital connexions. If you're living on a farm in rural Iceland [I know, not common, but for sake of argument], but you're also a big online gamer and forum-goer, it's could be quite easy for you to get to a point where most of your regular social interaction, at least with people of your generation, is conducted in English, at which point Icelandic becomes the language you use to talk to your grandparents...

Operating systems and major internet platforms not being available in Icelandic is easily (if not cheaply) fixable.

Are you volunteering?
Icelandic has only a bit over 300,000 speakers, most of whom can perfectly well use other languages. That doesn't equate to a great demand for companies to localise their products.

I don't believe that not having your internet browser available in Icelandic will lead to the death of Icelandic, given that there are thousands of languages for which this is also true, and yet they maintain language transmission.

But of course, it remains to be seen how many will continue to do so. It's also not fair to compare languages in wildly different situations. Icelandic's situation is specifically:
a) a small speakerbase
b) extremely high proficiency in the global lingua franca
c) a very high level of digital integration

Obviously, things like a lack of localised software will be much less of an issue for any language where at least one of these three factors is not applicable.

What you're describing might conceivably lead to a diglossic situation where English is used as a language for certain domains and Icelandic for others, but that does not in and of itself entail language death.

No, but it does open the door to it. Because then the question becomes: so in which domains is Icelandic used?

If it isn't used with peers in informal contexts, and it isn't used in professional contexts (I don't know if that's currently true of Icelandic, but it's increasingly true of many languages much bigger than Icelandic, where English is considered the language of 'business'), and it isn't used when consuming media in your free time, and it isn't used in pursuing your hobbies, and it isn't used in carrying out household tasks... when is it going to be used? If the answer is just "when talking to elderly people and when acting like a professional politician", then the language is in trouble...

I don't see the situation in Iceland changing, barring some major event

I agree - but where I think we disagree is the notion that there has not already been, and will not continue to be, a number of major events! The advent of mass media, of international telcommunications, of economic and cultural globalisation, of professional and personal computerisation, and of digital connectivity have been immense sociological transformations that have not yet fully played out (bearing in mind that language change is a relatively slow process, requiring generations). And future changes, like domestic computerisation and economic digitalisation, are already dawning.


-----------

To look at this from another side: my family's from Ireland. In two hundred years, Irish has gone from the language of the majority (i.e. millions of people) to a language of a minority with amost everyone at least a second-language speaker, to the language of only a minority, to the language of a bilingual minority, to its current status as an undead language: a language that has no native speakers, learnt only as an affectation, and generally in a form heavily influenced by the lingua franca. A century ago, Irish had twice as many speakers as Icelandic has now, and even had tens of thousands of monolingual speakers! So it's hardly absurd to talk about the language of a major European nation being in serious threat of terminal decline...

[Linguoboy]

To look at this from another side: my family's from Ireland. In two hundred years, Irish has gone from the language of the majority (i.e. millions of people) to a language of a minority with amost everyone at least a second-language speaker, to the language of only a minority, to the language of a bilingual minority, to its current status as an undead language: a language that has no native speakers, learnt only as an affectation, and generally in a form heavily influenced by the lingua franca. A century ago, Irish had twice as many speakers as Icelandic has now, and even had tens of thousands of monolingual speakers! So it's hardly absurd to talk about the language of a major European nation being in serious threat of terminal decline...

Not to distract from your larger point, but there are still native speakers of Irish (I know because I've met some), just not very many. It's an interesting case study of what happens when L2 speakers of a language come to vastly outnumber native speakers, even in its country of origin and particularly in officialdom.

[Salmoneus]

To look at this from another side: my family's from Ireland. In two hundred years, Irish has gone from the language of the majority (i.e. millions of people) to a language of a minority with amost everyone at least a second-language speaker, to the language of only a minority, to the language of a bilingual minority, to its current status as an undead language: a language that has no native speakers, learnt only as an affectation, and generally in a form heavily influenced by the lingua franca. A century ago, Irish had twice as many speakers as Icelandic has now, and even had tens of thousands of monolingual speakers! So it's hardly absurd to talk about the language of a major European nation being in serious threat of terminal decline...

Not to distract from your larger point, but there are still native speakers of Irish (I know because I've met some), just not very many. It's an interesting case study of what happens when L2 speakers of a language come to vastly outnumber native speakers, even in its country of origin and particularly in officialdom.

Fair point, grma. I think the distinction I was (subconsciously) making was between native Irish speakers and native bilinguals - I know there are some of the latter, and possibly quite a lot depending how you define things (how much Irish do you have to grow up using for it to count as native bilingualism? more than a couple of phrases, but less than literary mastery...), but I didn't think there were any (as in, more than a handful) of the former anymore, at least in the current generation - but perhaps there are? There's an important distinction there, anyway, I think, for the future of a language - between people who grow up using bits of the language as, essentially, a particular register of the lingua franca, and people who grow up with the language as an independent language and learn the lingua franca non-natively but from a young age.

However, even if that distinction were valid, the rest of what I said ('learnt only as an affectation') clearly can't be supported upon it. For once, I was being more pessimistic than necessary...

[Imralu]

If it makes you feel any better, I was at a party a few years ago, where most of the people were Icelanders in their early 20s and they were all noisily playing beer pong and shouting in Icelandic while us non-Icelandic speakers were relegated to a little huddle in the corner where we spoke English and German. It's how a met a Romanian friend of mine (who I briefly dated) - he came, having been invited by one of the Icelanders, and after a quick greeting, she went back to Icelandic and no one was talking to him at all, so he was on the other side of the room by himself looking all bored and hot and I went over to very generously rescue him.

[Nooj]

I wrote a long reply about why I think this is more paranoia than reality, but I deleted it because in the end, it doesn't matter what I think.

We will all see soon enough if Icelandic goes extinct, as the OP seems to think it will be.

Personally I doubt it will even be 'vulnerable', let along 'endangered' along UNESCO's framework, in 25 years time.

What is needed is a sociolinguistic survey of several hundred or several thousand Icelandic youth. Then we'll have some hard figures instead of anecdotes, as interesting as that is.

In the meanwhile, if you are really afraid for your language, I highly recommend that you do something about it. Iceland is a democratic, first world country. You are not in the position of say, a minority language speaker in China, whose activism is severely constrained by the Chinese government.

[vegfarandi]

Veg, when you talk about children not speaking Icelandic among themselves, what age are you talking about? 3, 8, 13?

Also, if they're old enough, ask them why they speak English. It'd be interesting to know why they do.

I'm a little skeptical about blaming the media... millions of people hear other languages/dialects in the media without abandoning their home language. But that's also why I ask about age. I can see 13-year-olds speaking English to be cool, but 3-year-olds shouldn't care.

I just got back from there and I again saw this at the swimming pool and downtown. I wish I'd thought to ask, I'll definitely see if I can next time I'm there.

Twice this past December did I see pairs of kids on the street downtown speaking English, with an Icelandic parent, and once at the pool, a group of five kids came running out of the locker room all yelling in English. I spied on them again and confirmed they were Icelandic based on the names they called each other.

The kids I'm seeing doing this are the ones born in the latest decade, the ones between five and ten. When I was growing up, you'd see certain groups of teenagers speaking English to each other but they clearly sounded non-native and belonged to specific subcultures mostly Goths, gamers, nerds. These kids are specifically the generation raised with iPads playing YouTube, which can go on for hours, all in English, which is very different from my milliennial upbringing of very limited children's TV programming for about half an hour a day, all dubbed in Icelandic.

But of course, it remains to be seen how many will continue to do so. It's also not fair to compare languages in wildly different situations. Icelandic's situation is specifically:
a) a small speakerbase
b) extremely high proficiency in the global lingua franca
c) a very high level of digital integration

Obviously, things like a lack of localised software will be much less of an issue for any language where at least one of these three factors is not applicable.

Exactly. There's been attempts to localize software, but it's just such an unsustainable slog. Apple dropped Icelandic support with the release of Mac OS X and has never looked back. Facebook is translated but through crowdsourcing only, so it's quite bad overall, and the system doesn't provide case support so people's names for example, constantly show up in the incorrect case form. Google is probably the best in terms of its interfaces, but the real exposure for the generation I'm thinking about is from YouTube which is nearly all English. Amazon (full disclosure, my employer) has never even bothered with Iceland at all, so Icelanders generally use the UK or US marketplaces, and Alexa devices obviously have very poor non-English language support overall, anyway. Microsoft has occasionally translated Windows and Office into Icelandic but those releases tend to come out very late after the original releases and have poor adoption as far as I can tell (though they used to be mandated in schools, not sure what the state of that is at the moment.)

So translation – definitely not so cheap, and not easy. Professor emeritus Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson has worked on this quite a lot but now that he's retired, I'm worried about the state of it at the University of Iceland. Here's a Guardian article where he's quoted on this subject: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... extinction

Personally I doubt it will even be 'vulnerable', let along 'endangered' along UNESCO's framework, in 25 years time.

Icelandic has been found to have the lowest amount of digital support and likelihood of survival through the digital age in this META study: http://www.meta-net.eu/whitepapers/press-release

If it makes you feel any better, I was at a party a few years ago, where most of the people were Icelanders in their early 20s and they were all noisily playing beer pong and shouting in Icelandic while us non-Icelandic speakers were relegated to a little huddle in the corner where we spoke English and German. It's how a met a Romanian friend of mine (who I briefly dated) - he came, having been invited by one of the Icelanders, and after a quick greeting, she went back to Icelandic and no one was talking to him at all, so he was on the other side of the room by himself looking all bored and hot and I went over to very generously rescue him.

That sounds very familiar to me as someone who's brought a lot of Americans with me to Iceland. This is how it is with everyone born before the millennium, essentially. Not the post-millennial kids, however.

Not gonna try "Styrkár" cause nothing jumps right out at me. However, my guesses for "Þorgerður" are [θorgərður] and [θorgɛrður]. I'll be very surprised if they're in the ball park because this is the first time I've seen the name. The only "cheating," if you wanna call it that, I did was seeing if *r can be trilled. Even if it can't have been trilled, I'd have still used [r] and specified it as the trill.

[ˈstɪɾ̊kauɾ̊] and [ˈθɔɾɟɛɾðuɾ̊] The Icelandic /r/ is mostly just flapped (but trilled occurs from time to time) but the more difficult challenge is the fact it tends to be voiceless.