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Perhaps number of speakers? Icelandic only has 320,000 speakers. I suspect it would be easier to control the direction of a language with that many speakers compared to French's 200,000,000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language

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I would guess the relative isolation of Iceland for a very long time is also a factor. While the French constantly mixed with pretty much all European peoples during medieval times, receiving an influx of things and concepts in need for a word, the number of people crossing the borders of Iceland was very limited, for practical reasons.

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