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Abstract
Purist language policies in Iceland have preserved and modernized Icelandic up until the present time. However, the impact of globalization and global English has led to the perception that the language is less secure than in the past and has prompted efforts by policy makers towards greater protection of Icelandic. This monograph presents the current language profile of Iceland, along with the history of Icelandic and the language ideologies underpinning it, which have led up to present day language planning efforts: in corpus planning and some domains of status planning such as education and the media. The monograph discusses the impact of supranational language policies upon Iceland's language planning, the role of the media in language spread, as well as current trends in the domain of higher education. Furthermore, the authors explore whether Icelandic can be maintained as the sole language of Iceland.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Andrea Haraldsson for producing the maps shown in . The authors' thanks are gratefully extended to the following consultants and correspondents and their respective institutions: Jón Atli Benediktsson, Pro-Rector of Academic Affairs, and Magnús Diðrik Baldursson, Managing Director of the Rector's Office and Head of Quality Administration, University of Iceland; Júlíus K. Björnsson, Head of Educational Testing Institute; Elfa Ýr Gylfadóttir, Head of Division of Media, Department of Cultural Affairs, Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture; Guðrún Kvaran, Chairman of the Icelandic Language Council, Head of the Department of Lexicography, The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, University of Iceland; Guðni Olgeirsson and Erna Árnadóttir, Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture; Óskar Óskarsson, Project Manager, Office of International Education, University of Iceland; Sigrún Stefánsdóttir, Head of Channel 1 and Channel 2, Icelandic State Broadcasting Service Radio; Valgerður Stefánsdóttir, Head of The Communication Centre for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing; Amal Tamimi, Vice Chairman of Iceland's Immigrant Council. The authors' thanks are also gratefully extended to students and staff of Fjölbrautaskóli Suðurlands, Selfoss, Iceland.
Notes
Please note that views quoted in this monograph, from written sources or interviews with policy-makers, are not necessarily shared by the authors.
Throughout the text, the authors have used the proper Icelandic characters. The Icelandic alphabet and other grammar notes are to be found in the appendix.
The Codex Wormianus contains four treatises on language, rhetoric and poetry. They have ‘traditionally come to be known respectively as the First, the Second, the Third, and the Fourth Grammatical Treatise’ (Benediktsson, Citation1972, p. 14).
The task of the author of the First Grammatical Treatise was in part parallel to some initiatives taken by his contemporaries elsewhere in Northern Europe. It is evident that the authors and scribes were aware of the inadequacies of the ‘traditional’ orthography when used for their respective (newly established) literary vernaculars. For example, in eleventh-century Germany, the Benedictine monk Notker marked German vowel length consistently for the first time, and in England around 1200, the Augustinian canon Orm invented a method to mark phoneme quantity (Benediktsson, Citation1972, p. 37).
The term íslenska (Icelandic) was not used in the first centuries of the history of Icelandic. Rather, ‘Nordic’ (norræna) or ‘Danish’ (danska) were the common terms for the medieval Nordic language which came to be preserved in Iceland. In 1558, in a text by Bishop Gísli Jónsson, the term íslenska occurs in print for the first time (Sigmundsson, Citation1990–1991, p. 129; 2003, p. 65). By then, the former common Nordic language was no longer comprehensible to the other Nordic peoples.
Some of the better-known European language academies are Accademia della Crusca (in Italy, founded in Florence in 1582–1583), Académie française (French Academy, founded in 1635), Real Academia Española (Spanish Academy, founded in 1713), and Svenska Akademien (Swedish Academy, founded in 1786).
Sveinbjörn Egilsson had been partly brought up and educated by the founder of the Society for National Enlightenment, Judge Magnús Stephensen (Sigmundsson, Citation2003, p. 71).
Some of these are discussed in more detail in the ensuing section.
Throughout this text, all quotations from Icelandic, both in legal documents and in other sources, have been translated into English by the authors.
Some publishers of term lists have, in fact, sought to meet the quality demands for accuracy and systemacity by, for example, listing their neologisms in a logical numerical order in columns parallel to the respective concept definition in English and equivalent terms in English and other languages. This method is supposed to ensure that Icelandic scientists and technicians can adhere to the international standard terminlogy apparatus, even if they are using Icelandic neologisms to denote the terms themselves.
There were about 250 users of ISL in 2009, as reported in Part I.
Iceland became a member of COE in 1950.
These surveys, involving 86 and 58 students between 16 and 20 years of age, respectively, were carried out to investigate students' use of and attitudes towards English.
The views presented here are not necessarily those of the authors.
As the reader will have noted, ‘Sport’ and ‘Extra’ are examples of lexical borrowings in Icelandic.
The secondary Nordic language community also includes speakers of Sami, Faroese and Greenlandic and some 200 immigrant languages, which are not covered by the Nordic Language Convention.
A survey was commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture in 2001 and carried out by Price Waterhouse Coopers to investigate how competent the general public perceive themselves to be in English. The results of this survey indicated that 63.8% reported themselves to be ‘competent’ and 25.3% to be ‘reasonably competent’, i.e. almost 90% of the general public (Óladóttir, Citation2009).