Patrick Cox: Hi. We’re back with a second episode about the endlessly fascinating Icelandic language. And in this installment, an existential question.
If you didn’t hear the first episode— it’s called Icelandic, the language that recycles everything — it’s about what makes Icelandic so extraordinary, so much of an outlier when it comes to language evolution. Here’s a quick recap. Icelandic has changed far more slowly than most languages do. Iceland, of course, is an island nation, and until recently a pretty inhospitable one wedged up against the Arctic Circle. In that sense it’s not surprising that the language has changed so little; there just wasn’t much coming and going. But now when there is a ton of coming and going, and that’s when you’d expect the country to just import words from English and other languages.
But Icelanders have long resisted that. When they needed a word to describe something new — telephone, television, podcast — they consulted their back catalog, starting with the Icelandic Sagas which were written down 13th and 14th centuries. They find words that have fallen out of use and they recycle them, combining them with other words and creating new, modern meanings. So that in a minute was the first episode. Give it a listen.
So now the existential question: One hundred years from now will people even be speaking Icelandic?
Patrick Cox: From Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America, this is Subtitle: stories about languages and the people who speak them. I’m Patrick Cox. What happens to a language that draws on its past when globalization and the future come knocking?
Jón Gnarr: I think Icelandic is not going to last. I think we — probably in this century — we will adopt English as our language.
Patrick Cox: Yikes! How could it be that Icelanders might just switch to English? And if Icelandic disappears, how many other languages that we may think of as stable and established — how many of them could be imperiled? The interviews in this episode are from a few years ago, which only means that doomsday for these languages could be that much closer. Or perhaps not.
Patrick Cox: Zuzana Stankovitsová is from Slovakia. For the past few years she has lived in Reykjavik, studying the Icelandic language. Pretty early on, she sensed that Icelanders had strong feelings about their language. So, for her Master’s thesis, she devised a survey to test this. She asked Slovaks and Icelanders to define their nationality. Most of the Slovaks said:
Zuzana Stankovitsová: “I am Slovak because my parents are Slovak.”
Patrick Cox: Or: “Because I was born in Slovakia.” Family ties. Ties to the land.
Zuzana Stankovitsová: With the Icelanders the language came up very often the first position: “I am Icelandic because I speak Icelandic.”
Patrick Cox: The language means that much.
Sound of Iclandic song “Land, Nation and Tongue.”
Patrick Cox: Most adult Icelanders recall learning this song at school. It’s called “Land, Nation and Tongue.” The poem it’s based on was written in 1952 when Iceland was a new nation.
Ari Páll Kristinsson: Land, nation and tongue was a divine trinity — not the divine trinity. But on a similar level as that.
Patrick Cox: Linguist Ari Páll Kristinsson says this was the patriotic belief instilled in him as a child. The country was nothing without its language.
Ari Páll Kristinsson: If we lost the Icelandic language, there would be no Icelandic nation. And if there’s no Icelandic nation, there is no Icelandic sovereignty.
Patrick Cox: Iceland only won full sovereignty during World War Two. The divine trinity was finally in place. But almost immediately there was a challenge to the language, though not recognized at the time. It came in the form of 40,000 US troops who were stationed in Iceland during the war. The US military didn’t completely leave until 2006. By then, most Icelanders spoke fluent English alongside their native tongue.
Ari Páll Kristinsson: English is everywhere now, from the moment we wake up until we die.
Jón Gnarr: I think Icelandic is not going to last.
Patrick Cox: Jón Gnarr is a former mayor of Reykjavik.
Jón Gnarr: I think we probably in this century we will adopt English as our language.
Patrick Cox: Really? I imagine there would be a lot of Icelanders who’d be extremely worried about that, would see Icelandic as a central part national identity and their own identity.
Jón Gnarr: Yes it is. But I think it’s unavoidable.
Patrick Cox: It’s the usual story. Urbanization, air travel, Satellite TV, the internet. Every nation has been changed by these things. But Iceland more so, more quickly. Gone was the isolation that had done so much to protect the language.
Jón Gnarr: When I was growing up, very few people spoke English, With my generation and with television and music it became necessary to understand English. And now, for instance, in the case of my children, they speak much better English than I do. Most of their activity, for instance, on Facebook is in English, because they have friends in different countries, so they express themselves in English. But they don’t speak as good Icelandic as I do. So it’s drastic change in a very short time.
Patrick Cox: Language purists — and there are many in Iceland — they believe that the best chance for survival would be to resist importing words from English, and to hang on to the language’s archaic and complicated grammar. That, after all, is what makes Icelandic unique. If it ends up sounding like other languages, then people would be less inclined to value it. That’s the argument.
Larissa Kyzer: I think that people are — -especially older people — are very sceptical of the use of the English.
Patrick Cox: This is Larissa Kyzer, an American who lives in Reykjavik and studies Icelandic.
Larissa Kyzer: I think there’s a big push to make people proud of it as a language. The afterschool program where I work has all these posters up on the wall now: ‘Icelandic is our mother tongue.’ I had a teacher who would ask her children, she said they could swear all they wanted as long as they used Icelandic swearwords.
Patrick Cox: There’s nothing like the sweet taste of transgression. After the break, a couple of possible future scenarios for Icelandic.
Patrick Cox: This is the final episode of this season. We’ll be back at some point, not sure when. I know there’s no shortage of other podcasts to listen to, but if you’d like to keep up with all things Subtitle, consider subscribing to our newsletter. We’ll pick out a couple of our favorite language-related news stories. We recommend other podcasts. And there’s some goofy lingo stuff too. Plus, we’ll give you a heads up on what’s in the works for the next Subtitle season. We won’t inundate you, just pop a little something into your inbox every 2 or 3 weeks. And, of course, like this podcast, it’s free.
Patrick Cox: So where is Icelandic headed? There are several possibilities. Here are two. The first draws on Icelanders’ reverence for storytelling, from the Sagas of old to the extraordinary number of writers today. Some linguists believe that the tipping point for Icelandic — the moment that it might truly leave the hearts of Icelanders — would be when the country’s poets and novelists stop writing in Icelandic. Sverrir Norland has some experience of this.
Sverrir Norland: There wasn’t really any plan.
Patrick Cox: No plan at all, he just wanted to improve his writing. So the young Icelander left his home country for a creative writing course in London.
Sverrir Norland: And for obvious reasons I had to write in English.
Patrick Cox: First it felt fake, then liberating. Which reminded him of a quote attributed to Björk, the musician.
Sverrir Norland: She said something like “When I first started singing in English I felt like I was lying.” That’s kind of terrible thing, but at the same time it’s kind of freeing. You can be whoever you want to be.
Patrick Cox: Like, you don’t have be Icelandic anymore. Norland didn’t go that far — in fact, he’s writing in Icelandic again these days. But would he ever write more fiction in English? Not out of the question, he says. And he’s not the only one.
So that’s the first possibility — that more writers may switch to English, sending a powerful message to their readers in Iceland. Here’s the second possibility, and it’s a rosier picture: immigration may give Icelandic a boost.
Sound of coffee roasting.
Patrick Cox: In a restaurant in the tiny town of Flúðir, on the other side of a mountain range from Reykjavik, Azeb Kahssay roasts coffee beans on an open flame. Kahssay co-owns this restaurant. She’s from Ethiopia. Her native tongue is Amharic.
Azeb Kahssay teaches Patrick to say something in Amharic
Patrick Cox: Kahssay has lived in Iceland for 7 years.
Azeb Kahssay: I’m more Icelandic perfect, not English.
Patrick Cox: So you’re better at Icelandic than English.
Azeb Kahssay: Yes.
Patrick Cox: So you’re probably the only Amharic speaker who is better at Icelandic than English.
Azeb Kahssay: (laughing) Yeah!
Patrick Cox: Icelanders admire immigrants like Kahssay who’ve mastered their language. But at the same time traditionalists worry that non-native speakers may alter the language. But if that’s the case, bring it on, says another Icelandic novelist, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir.
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir: I’m looking very much forward to the time when immigrants start to write literature in their…version of Icelandic, their understanding of — creating new words. That’s how language should be: alive, creative, inventive.
Patrick Cox: Just like the language of the Sagas many centuries ago, says Ólafsdóttir. She, by the way, is fluent in several languages but says she would only ever write in her mother tongue.
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir: I think that the world needs stories that are told in Icelandic.
Patrick Cox: Which is what Ólafsdóttir does. I’ve read one of her novels. It’s called Butterflies in November. It really is an Icelandic tale: funny, sad, not at all sentimental but epic — or maybe mock-epic. You feel the influence of the Sagas. I can’t attest to how much all of this has to do with it being written in Icelandic. I read it in an English translation.
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir: What is so interesting about languages is that you can’t translate everything. For example, we have word in Icelandic, skárri. You can only translate it as ‘better’ in English. But in fact it means that you are in a situation confronted by two bad options, two bad choices, but one is slightly better. And that is something that happens often in the — it’s part of our mentality. It happens often, you can find this old literature: the heroes are confronted by some difficulties, something that might be fatal, and there’s one options that is slightly better: skárri.
Patrick Cox: I suppose the English equivalent here would be “the lesser of two evils.” But we don’t have a single word for it. It doesn’t mean that much to us, it doesn’t figure as predominantly as skárri. It’s a nice example of how writing in Icelandic may better help convey what it is may be to be Icelandic. Sverrir Norland — the writer who has written in English but now is back writing in Icelandic — he looks at this in a different way.
Sverrir Norland: I mean if I’m telling the story in Icelandic, I’m thinking about Icelandic people — Icelandic readers — and I’m assuming they share a similar background, experience and knowledge about the stuff I’m talking about. But if I’m writing in English about Icelandic people, I would be explaining all kinds of different things, so it just turns out very differently.
Patrick Cox: So that leaves the language in the care of Icelanders, for sure. But also with the increasing cohort of foreigners in Iceland. People like Larissa Kyzer. Learning this not-altogether-useful, tiny language.
Patrick Cox: What happens when you tell people back in the United States what you’re doing.
Larissa Kyzer: Oh, because it’s Iceland, because it’s Icelandic, people are generally really interested that I’m here and doing this. The language side people generally regard as kind of crazy. But it seems like — I think sometimes it seems like a very romantic adventure. So mostly it’s been a very positive response.
Patrick Cox: I don’t know now, but I imagine that people might think of Icelandic as being something that people don’t speak anymore.
Larissa Kyzer: In some ways, I think people’s closest association — and this is a generalization — but people think of Elvish, for instance and J.R.R. Tolkien. And it seems like this mystical language that people in real life don’t really speak, or it’s a very small amount of people, obviously. So it’s clear that I’m not doing this for practical reasons in terms of communicating with a large group of people, which is both good and bad.
Patrick Cox: Hmm, I think it’s all good, and not bad at all. And I suspect Larissa does too. You could say she’s doing her bit to bring the Icelandic language to the rest of the world even more. Today she’s one of the most prominent and prolific literary translators of Icelandic into English. And as long as Larissa has novels and poetry and essays to translate, Icelandic may just be fine. I mean, doesn’t it come down to whether Icelanders continue to feel the urge to express themselves in their native tongue? It may even be that the native tongue will find a way of coexisting with English, in ways we can’t quite conceive of now. And this applies to many countries — and regions within countries — that are preparing to confront versions of this. There’ll probably be different approaches, different accommodations, of outside languages. As for Icelandic, I for one hope that Jón Gnarr, the former mayor of Reykjavik, is wrong. I hope it that people are still speaking the language.
Jón Gnarr, I should say, recently ran unsuccessfully for President of Iceland. He is a deeply serious person but also a very funny one. Before becoming mayor he was an actor and comedian. I did a long, very entertaining interview with him, which maybe I’ll include some bits from in the next Subtitle season.
Thanks to everyone who talked me about Icelandic, for this and the previous episode. And while we’re at it, thanks to everyone who agreed top submit to my often rambling and unfocused questions during this entire season. Thanks to Allison Shao who writes the Subtitle newsletter and manages our social media. Thanks also to Tina Tobey, Kavita Pillay and Nina Porzucki. And a tip of the cap to The World public radio program, PRX and Studio N.O.L.A.
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