Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Everyone has learned icelandic, basic danish and advanced english at age 16. From the age 16-20 majority of kids add a fourth language which is either french, german or spanish. I'm now extra grateful for all the languages that I was exposed too in school even though I didn't find them interesting at the time. It's easy to communicating and understanding the basics when travelling.
And I really love my language and I'm sure that it'll hold up just fine for the next decades. I know few examples of families with children that have grown up abroad and yes, their grammar often is strange but they speak quite well and they feel a connection back "home" through the language.
I can reword your statement to use Spanish and Peru. It sounds just as weird:
I see the spread of the Spanish language a step in the Peruvianization of the world, which is a shame.
Iceland (I assume) imports far more American culture than British. They simply dominate many forms of art (TV, movies, games). So while you are right that America is not the birthplace of English, English is the medium in which American culture spreads.
People in China haven't been aggressively learning English the last ~30 years primarily so they can do business with New Zealand. English become the global language of commerce because the US took over nearly half of the global economy, and over half of its manufacturing, immediately after WW2.
It's pretty simple: the British started that fire, then their empire declined. The US picked up their torch and made the fire a lot bigger with the wide-spread globalization we see today coinciding with the US becoming the sole superpower post WW2 (ie produced a perfect storm for English spreading globally).
There's a reason why people haven't been aggressively learning Chinese despite it being the language of the world's #2 economic power, and that's because all the boots on the ground work to set up civil services, education systems and trade networks and associate their language with prestige and power had already been done by colonialists speaking other languages.
Of course, but it's not relevent.
> I see the spread of the Spanish language a step in the Peruvianization of the world, which is a shame.
Peru isn't driver of Spanish-speaking culture the way the US is the driver of English-speaking culture.
TV shows, music, film, technology news and discussion websites, …. Most are US-made, and go hand in hand with the spread of the English language. An English lerner in ${X} will watch Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Spiderman, … (all in English, maybe with suptitles), will listen to Rhianna, Eminem, …, and will talk about "Performance", "Data Center" or use other English loanwords (if working with technology at least). It's obvious to me enough exposure to US culture does lead to a US way of thinking.
The accusation is often leveled against American cultural imperialism. But the language being imposed isn't a Native American language...it isn't Navajo that's being spread across the globe, it's the language that replaced so many Native American languages when the American continent was conquered. And while American English has undergone some cosmetic changes, it's largely the same language that was brought over by the colonists/invaders. So if it's an English language, it must have originated in England, right? But no, it's derived from the Germanic and Norman conquests with a smattering of classical Greek and the original Anglo-Saxon language. And its Latin origins even come by way of the Roman conquest of Gaul. Even the alphabet used comes from the subset of English characters used in German printing presses.
This notion that languages are something that need to be preserved is antithetical to the purpose of language and the history of the development of languages. We have many languages because, historically, we had many groups that didn't have regular contact with each other. And whenever there were groups that had regular contact with each other, language adapted to that fact and evolved. And now with globalization and the internet, we're beginning a phase where everyone has regular contact with everyone else. It's silly to think that language won't do what it's done every time you mix people who speak different languages throughout history. It isn't a process that happens overnight, but over the course of generations, languages that cannot impose a power dynamic will be lost to history or rendered irrelevant in the way that, say, Welsh is today.
We can be sad about it or try to fight it, but it's an inevitability and fighting that is ultimately futile.
Why does the power dynamic of the language speakers (and therefore their linguistic dominance) provide a counterbalance to the loss of culture? That is, why do you specifically value one over the other, and in what sense is this comical?
Growing up in an area with rip tides, it was always drilled into my head that if I got caught in one and started getting dragged out to sea, I shouldn't fight it. Instead, I should swim parallel to shore until I'm out of the current and can more easily swim back to shore. Just like a rip current, language adaptation due to power dynamics is a reality. You can either accept that and try to make the best of that situation or you can put up a futile resistance.
There's no value system at play just like there's no value system in gravity or rip currents. They're just facts that you accept and integrate into whatever plan you're making.
But
I don't think it is wrong to want to preserve culture and or language. I actually have really strong views that we MUST preserve language and everything that stems from it.
Not necessarily in the sense that we must all be able to speak it - English is going to dominate no matter what you do - but from a purely academic stand point it gives us an incredible insight into how humans have developed historically and may even help explain some of our misgivings in the future. Recording language is something we should be doing in the same way we are creating seed vaults in the arctic.
Language is what I believe truly defines us as humans. People who speak multiple languages often have completely different personalities [1] when speaking each language.
The language you speak can also alter many things including the way you view and reason about:
- Time [2]
- Color [3]
- Direction / left and right / forward and back [3]
- And even whether you know your own gender [3]
The list probably doesn't stop there but it shows you that losing these languages means we lose a completely different way of viewing the world - I think that would be kind of sad, I'm just glad we at least learned this before they're all lost.
> It's that I observe a dynamic that has persisted throughout human history and see people trying to fight it. Why is right now the time that we should "freeze" language adaptation to save culture?
I don't think "right now" is the time - I suspect all lost languages have struggled with losing their place and would have had people attempt to fight it and preserve the language.
Remember, our history likely doesn't cover the languages that have been lost and the struggle to preserve them specifically because they have been lost.
> If that's the perspective, why aren't we also trying resurrect Ancient Egyptian language to preserve that culture as well?
I'm glad you bought that up - it is a perfect example because we know how to read and write the language but we can only begin[4] to imagine how it actually sounds - and what ways it may have altered our views.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201111/c...
[2] http://theconversation.com/language-alters-our-experience-of...
[3] https://ideas.ted.com/5-examples-of-how-the-languages-we-spe...
[4] https://www.connectsavannah.com/savannah/how-do-we-know-how-...
If a Frenchman shoots someone with a bullet made in Germany, would you say the victim was killed by a German?
The origins of the language don't matter to the point being made, which is that having one's native language adopted by everyone else provides massive benefits in spreading one's culture and values, while weakening and even killing off others.
This notion that languages are something that need to be preserved is antithetical to the purpose of language and the history of the development of languages. We have many languages because, historically, we had many groups that didn't have regular contact with each other.
This is not the whole story, languages were and are created for the purpose of demarcating and separating a subculture from the majority. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_(language)
And that point is irrelevant. Now that everyone is communicating with everyone else, a common language is an inevitability. And that language isn't going to be chosen democratically or designed, it's going to flow from a power dynamic. That's what's going to happen because that's what's always happened. Arguing that it shouldn't happen or is wrong is like arguing against gravity, evolution or any other fact of life.
That doesn't mean that other languages will just go away (just look at how many other languages are alive in some form in the UK, despite English having been dominant there for centuries), it just means that they won't be as ubiquitous as they once were because people will have the option not to learn them.
Where did you get this idea? Only 47% of the world is using the Internet [0]. Only 20% speaks English [1]. Hell, even the "most commonly spoken language" Mandarin consists of dialects that vary between mutually intelligible to total unintelligible.
If AI allows us to convincingly translate among languages when speaking to each other, it would remove any need for people to learn a common language. Given how much research is going into that problem, we might see that problem solved faster than the time when "everyone is communicating with everyone else."
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/22... [1]https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-eng...
This is also why the most hardcore language persevering fanatics tend to also be hardcore xenophobes.
Whether there was an Anglo–Saxon “conquest” per se is a controversial and fairly interesting historical question. Wikipedia has a summary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Brit...
Very interestingly though, Americans tend to visit places and usually contain themselves to the very small pockets of countries where people can speak English to them. I can definitely see that in my country (France), where American tourists only go to the-place-where-all-americans-go, and then come back amazed that people spoke English to them.
This tends to be very disconnected from the actual English-speaking skills of the population (which, for my country, is pretty abysmal).
On the other hand you have a lot of peoples who draw a lot of pride or just a sense of identity from exploring their culture and its heritage.
And finally you have the arguable need and definite convenience of a lingua franca in the face of increasing globalization.
Sure, but people decide what language to speak based on what is most practical for them. Not on what gives you the most exotic vacation.
Personally, I see a future world where all people on earth can talk to each other as an enormous benefit. I'm really confused by the priorities of anyone who honestly thinks otherwise.
However, I do think we Faroese are too bad at Faroese grammar.
Side-note, because we were occupied by the British during WW2, a _lot_ of British slang has been incorporated and turned Faroese, and a lot of regular English words turned into Faroese slang.
And even greater opportunity cost is the lack of in-depth knowledge of your own language.
Language isn't just grammar rules. It also has cultural/regional/historical/etc.
You can learn a few languages and be somewhat proficient at all of them or you can have expert level grasp of the language - where you can discuss philosophical, historical, economic, cultural, etc topics.
Not to mention, jokes, puns along with culture-specific references.
Personally, I wish the education system ( in the US ) focused on english, latin and ancient greek for K-12. I don't think you can fully understand english without understanding a bit of latin and even ancient greek.
Hákarl FTW
I think being from a small nation with such an odd history is awesome. I think Icelandic will preserve itself because the Icelandic people seem stubbornly determined while also pragmatic.
Being fluent in English and Viking is all upside, no downside.
In small towns like Akureryi, there's a lot of local pressure to keep signs mostly in Icelandic. I was actually surprised by this since there were a lot of English-speaking tourists in the area, but I respect it thoroughly. It's their country, I should learn how to get around.
Oh, as an aside - as someone who is single and still uses the various datings apps, I was also impressed by how idiomatically correct their english was even down to slang and figures of speech. There's clearly a large influence from American media.
If you're travelling to Iceland, take the time to learn a few basic Icelandic phrases - the locals have a lot of pride in their culture and will love you for it.
(But then again Google Translate now has World Lens built in - so that helps)
But yeah, certainly the more populated areas are extremely English-friendly. My folks in Arkansas probably see more non-English speakers in the average month than I did in Reykjavik.
You're right that Akureyri is not a small town for Iceland, though.
I am curious, does this apply to everyone or only European-looking people?
I found that the children in Iceland know English surprisingly well. My children were playing with an 8-year-old Icelandic girl who spoke nearly flawless English. I was impressed.
To the point, I'm neither European nor white and was almost always spoken to in Spanish when in Spain. That may be because of the lower level of English proficiency in Spain, however.
Where I live, there's also a local language (Frisian) spoken beside the 'bigger' language (Dutch). And here too, lots of people speak English. Or if not, you might get lucky with German.
Also, because of concerns of linguistic extinction, similar to the ones mentioned for Icelandic in the article, you see somewhat of a counter-movement as well. This caused e.g. a special status of the language by law (see e.g. [1]), and also:
* it's a mandatory school subject
* you are entitled to using it in government interactions, e.g. in court
* a small part of the public television is in Frisian, and there's also a regional tv/radio channel using it exclusively
* place name signs are often at least bilingual, and sometimes Frisian-only.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Charter_for_Regional_...
The tipping point is IMO what language people start conversations with. That shifts language skills and feeds off it's self.
I'd say even that can't accomplish much by itself, which is why the other things you listed are so important. A lot of Mexican-American kids in my hometown spoke exclusively Spanish at home, and now as adults if you ask them if they can speak Spanish most of them say "not really." They're embarrassed if they have to speak Spanish with someone from Mexico who has an adult vocabulary and a sophisticated grasp of the language. When your education, media, and social life is entirely in English, you end up so much more capable in English that that's all you want to speak. Even with their friends who also spoke Spanish at home, if the context of the conversation was their English-language schoolwork or an American band or an American TV show, it was more natural to talk about it in English; if there was somebody present they didn't know, it was safe to assume they spoke English; et cetera.
I think there were almost no advantages to this dialect killing.
Small minority dialects are at a danger of dying out, not crowding out the bigger languages. This is how all of europe worked for hundreds of years. My Grandfather grew up speaking yiddish (german dialect) in school, czech in town & Hungarian at school. These are completely unrelated and individually difficult languages. He later went to college in German & Latin, later on English. He spoke 10 languages in total, most fluently. I knew him in a language that he learned in his 40s. This was normal in his day. They weren't afraid of languages then.
Anyway... if your "home" language is a tiny, local one. There is no danger that you will be monolingual in a commercially useless language. You will speak a big language too. Speaking 2 makes the 3rd one easier to learn.
^more on the dialect end of the spectrum than most people realize.
And it was purely the result of broadcast radio.
This article and map were pretty interesting:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/langua...
Where the government intervenes in the opposite direction, the transition can be much more rapid. Visiting Strasbourg (in Alsace, France), people's surnames, street and place names, and the local cuisine are all German, but nobody speaks a word of it. It was amazing (and slightly depressing) to see how in 2-3 generations a city could forget the language it spoke for nigh-on 1,500 years.
The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Dutch were considered a dying language 50 years from now.
So it wasn't German very long, only 50 years.
As for Montreal, it will be interesting to see how the city evolves. I notice more English in my neighbourhood than when I moved in (8 years ago). But, there is also more French in the old anglo neighbourhoods of the west.
One factor is that a lot of "allophones" are perfectly fluent in both English and French. When you add in the francophone tendency to switch to English when dealing with anyone who shows even a whiff of not being a native francophone, a lot of francophone majority neighbourhoods may see English conversation.
(I'm perfectly fluent and speak French in public. But for the life of me I can't francophone friends to speak French. I think they all want to practice their English. Also, the Quebecois that care about Anglicization probably don't move to urban montreal)
I used Welsh, Irish, Catalan and French-in-Quebec as examples because they're all languages that declined (to varying degrees) over several centuries under (varying degrees of) government suppression, experienced a partial rebound in interest and popularity in the 20th century after government policy was changed to encourage their use, but ultimately returned to the same trend of declining usage, something like
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0|suppressed encouragedMaybe they don't speak it normally, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people there can speak German. You can literally take a city bus (or walk) over the border into a German town Kiel. And everyone speaks German there. There are people who work in Strasbourg and live in Kiel, or vice versa.
The Alsatian dialect was always more of a rural thing. Both French and the Nazis suppressed it so unfortunately it's pretty rare these days. Still, according to Wikipedia, 43% of adults in Alsace could speak it in 1999. [1]
Many people around the world speak English, but they don't become culturally American or British because of it.
Look at the less forced genres of music. Rap in the USA, Grime in the UK, similar but different. The UK has a very different type of indie (named from coming from an independent label) music. And Country is only popular in the USA.
If you have a quick look on the surface it can be similar, but if you look deeper, where it matters, then the variation is there.
That said, I do think having more languages is better, a more diversified ecosystem is more likely to survive. And from my point of view, it's more interesting to live in.
American rock has its roots in Jazz and Bluegrass, which has its roots in the African slave diaspora. Japanese Visual Kei was influenced heavily by American glam rock bands. Does that mean Visual Kei merely an imitation of American culture, or that it expresses the same things that American rock does? Of course not. You can borrow the sound and the style but still make something culturally unique.
K-Pop is probably more "Americanized" than Japanese pop, but it's still distinctly not American. I don't think anyone would confuse either Japanese or Korean culture for American culture, even though both incorporate Western aesthetics and English into their cultural expressions.
Actually it kind of does of does;
https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/11/multilingua...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/speaking-second-lang...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201111/c...
https://www.edge.org/conversation/lera_boroditsky-how-does-o...
At the very least having multiple languages ensures a diversity of thinking.
Then an Englishman asked for my John Hancock.
[An individual’s experience is built entirely in terms of his language.]
https://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_aff...
It's really unclear to me that much harm will be done if everyone speaks the same language, and it's clear to me that there will be great benefits. That's an easy position for me to take as a primary speaker of the world's dominant language. It's also no skin off my back if other language groups wish to continue maintaining their own languages. But I guess that those which aren't strong enough will fade over the centuries, as many already did in the past.
This is even true in math. Based on the set of axioms you allow, you can prove certain facts. A math with different axioms may have completely different theorems, and some observable real world behavior can be better modeled under one set of axioms than another.
Language could be described as a math for personal expression and everyday life, and each language has its own axioms and theorems.
I am very skeptical that this happens commonly, or that the necessary terms couldn't be ported over to the common language if needed.
> Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there. But what brought the sandwiches there? Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred.
The strong hypothesis says that language determines and bounds your thinking, the weak hypothesis is that it influences and conditions your thinking.
It is only a rather recent development, since roughly the 1960s, that the Esperanto movement has advertised itself as a force against language imperialism and as purely an international second language for everyone, one that supposedly “protects” their native languages. Some Esperantists have criticized this change in marketing as simply trying to jump on the anti-imperialism and anti-globalization bandwagon just to get more attention for Esperanto.
L. L. Zamenhof himself hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all world languages, because he saw those differences between peoples as purely a negative thing. (Just like his Homaranismo was an attempt to level out religious differences with a single spirituality that hopefully would be taken up by all.) Zamenhof’s own writings and his lifelong efforts show that he did not really care for cultural diversity as many people today would understand it and hope for.
Culture is embedded into language, and suggesting that we should standardize on a handful of languages for the sake of convenience places very low (or maybe no) value on cultural preservation.
As someone who's been working very hard for the last two years to become bi-lingual, I had no idea how much I'd learn about my own native language from studying a different language, and incidentally, I've learned a ton about the underlying culture of the target language I'm learning. Every time a language dies, we lose a another piece of our global cultural tapestry, and I think that's a loss that's hard to quantify.
not a fair comparison. learning a second language takes much more resources (time and money) than having different paint colors or food choices.
All the cultures that exist today will die, no matter what actions we take today. People see cultural continuation, but if we hopped in a time machine and went back 100 years, none of us would fit in.
I understand the urge to preserve things we appreciate, but it's not possible to preserve living things.
Languages evolve, change, innovate and sometimes they go extinct. Latin disappeared with the downfall of the Roman Empire (although it is still used in the Vatican, including ATMs), but paved the way for many romance languages. Even Navajo saved lives during WWII.
Like species, we know they're condemned to eventual extinction. But who likes seeing something disappear forever?
Many translations are impossible to make because different languages allow for different meanings, metaphors and concepts. Their coexistence is actually beneficial and adds something to human culture.
If one would apply that reasoning to programming languages, the programming landscape would suffer terribly.
E só para enriquecer um pouco este comentário, aqui fica uma linha na minha língua materna!
Classical Latin aside, sermo vulgaris ("the common speech"—"Vulgar Latin") never died so much as it evolved over time into our modern family of Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Occitan, Catalan, Romanian, Dalmatian, Sardinian, …; the list goes on, but I'm sure you get the idea.
I think that, in the context of what I'm seeing throughout this thread, (and to be clear, this isn't directed at you specifically) before we worry that English will establish some sort of linguistic hegemony over the globe, we should first consider the processes by which some language or another comes to dominate international communication in such a way, and likewise the processes by which such an "auxiliary language" comes to be replaced eventually by another. I contend that the main reason English now serves the role once served by Latin is because the Anglosphere currently has much influence on the sociopoliticoeconomicocultural stage, yet it is not currently without rival on this stage. A century from now, it could happen that everyone will be learning Mandarin Chinese or Arabic or something else altogether. Perhaps Esperanto will finally take off.
Returning to Latin for a final thought: throughout medieval Europe this side of Macedonia, all educated people could read, write, and speak Latin, and no doubt they found that these abilities came in handy from time to time. Notwithstanding, it remained in place as a second language, reserved for specific situations and purposes, and they continued to employ their native language in their day-to-day activities—after all, we still have English, Irish, Gaelic, Scots, French, Dutch, German, Polish, Spanish, &c., &c. in the present. These are not the same languages that were spoken in the Middle Ages, nor are they the same languages that were spoken 100 years ago, but, as you pointed out, languages evolve and change.
I didn't mean it disappeared overnight but, as far as I know, formal education in Latin declined with the fall of the Empire, thus giving preponderance to Vulgar Latin. As a consequence, correct pronunciation diverged from the canon. At the same time, Germanic peoples travelled south bringing with them new dialects.
Anyway, I am not as worried about an eventual hegemony of English as I am about the disregard for the value of other languages.
Portuguese language, for example, was made the official language for matters of law by King Denis in 1290. But Castillian was still the lingua franca of the court for centuries. The then recent creation of the University of Coimbra helped build the formal Portuguese we know today.
I believe that it is always by creating something new, alongside the old, that good things happen. Hoping progress to come by following utopian notions of simplicity, making tabula rasa (oh, Latin, you...) of former culture is a recipe for disaster.
In my line of work I encounter many emigrants looking for temporary jobs in agriculture. No one here speaks English very well, let alone their languages.
I was very impressed by a worker from Nepal that, besides his mother tongue, spoke Hindi, Russian and English. In Portugal, his boss didn't speak but Portuguese.
Now I see a lot of emigrants from Eastern Europe and Nigeria.
The Spanish don't speak Portuguese. We chat in Portunhol, mainly.
Esperanto would be quite handy, but I suspect it won't take off anytime soon...
That makes it sound like such a division is something that is happening now, being _done to_ the world, even. Rather, of course, the world _is_ already diverse like that, and what is happening, if anything, is a homogenisation.
It's even worse with the younger generation. They can't even use Swedish idioms so they switch to English. For example, they might know and use "You're on thin ice" but don't know what "Ute på hal is" eller "Ute på tunn is" means. If I say "det ligger en hund begraven här" they will look at me funnily and not understand what I mean. However, if I say "Something smells fishy" they will know.
People older than me used even funnier idioms that no one uses anymore. For example "Du ler förnöjt som en katt som nyss svalt en kanariefågel."
I don't know what to do about it, if anything. :/ Undoubtedly, it is easier if everyone speaks the same language. But it is also much less interesting and much less diverse.
There are other interesting trends as well. The relatively good economic situation and contributing tourist boom mean you very often will be served in downtown Reykjavík by someone who doesn’t speak Icelandic. Icelanders are simply off doing other jobs. In the scheme of things it’s a small change but very noticeably different from when I moved here.
And that means US culture starts to affect more and more people.
Already today people that primarily watch english media have significantly different views on driving children to school, or social safety than those who watch primarily media in the local language, even correcting for age, gender, education, etc.
It’s scary to see because it’s means more and more of the broken parts of US culture end up here in Europe as well.
It seems that there's plenty of room for good programs no matter what their country of origin.
Germany and France each produce just as much or even more content than the UK.
Yet, none of this content ever leaves the country. British content can directly be sold on the US market, which means they can get much more money from those licensing deals to finance more productions.
The only situation where German or French productions show up internationally are nature documentaries (many of the documentaries the BBC or PBS show are produced by Germans, or as cooperation).
The English-speaking market is so large that English productions always have an advantage, and US productions even more. A US production reaches 300 million people in its home market, and a billion globally. A German production reaches 80 million in the home market, and 130 million globally.
And that's without the venefits hollywood has from having all the actors, staff and technology in one place.
This battle has been decided long ago.
Quite a few French, actually.
And whose fault is this? People enjoy Japanese media all over the world despite the language barrier. French media used to be very popular in my country, like for example Louis de Funès movies? Even Iceland produces media that's popular worldwide, like Lazy Town or Bjork.
I’d argue that no such pair of countries exists, except potentially ones with restricted media import rules, e.g. the pair of (North Korea, China).
Also, it sounds weird indeed when you use English phrases in your casual speech when direct translation exists. Like I was watching some old movie and a teen girl there said something like "Du, jag ska ha födelsedagskalas på fredag. I want you to come.". I even didn't catch it first.
But many words have more natural sounding translations that we did (and do) use, things like kompilator (compiler), kö (queue), träd (tree) etc. I left Sweden many years ago but still often use gurka as a metasyntactic variable.
BTW your "even funnier idiom" is well known in english as well (although I don't remember the last time I heard anyone say it):
Icelanders are going to have a harder time of it, because English can worm its way into Icelandic more easily than it can enter into Hebrew. Plus they have less of a critical mass.
[1] Not 100%. They still watch e.g. Moana in English, or sometimes watch shows in German, French, some English ones, etc.
It doesn't help that schools basically only push Spanish, which is actively besieged by half the population. I really wish schools would push things like mandarin and german more since it's a much larger part of the world economy.
Goes up to advanced level. The appeal for me is the ability to understand one of the least changed old European languages, much akin to our Old English. One that is bizarrely and amazingly still spoken.
Admittedly I do speak a fair bit of Swedish, potentially making things easier, but even without that there are many cognates that make learning it easier for English-speakers. Or German-speakers, for that matter.
From what I understand, written Icelandic is mutually intelligible with Old Norse, so if you learned Icelandic you could actually read the sagas. The pronunciation has diverged enough that the spoken languages aren't mutually intelligible, but nobody really speaks Old Norse anymore so it doesn't matter.
I guess it's kinda like the relationship between Middle English and Modern English. The written forms are similar enough that Chaucer is usually presented in the original Middle English alongside a gloss for whatever words have disappeared from the language since.
Language is really an artifact of isolation and distance. In an incredibly connected world, the pressure changes from divergence to convergence.
Like other commenters, I have mixed feelings about this. Another used the word "balkanized" (which is a great word) to describe a world divided by incomprehensible language.
Others note that a monoculture isn't the only solution. (Bi|multi)lingualism is another alternative. Multilingualism was the historical response to a world becoming increasingly connected. My great-grandfather grew up in an area where he spoke Russian, French, German and Latvian... by necessity. Depending on which way the political winds were blowing his generation could be conscripted into the Russian or German (maybe Prussian at this point) armies.
That works fine when your sphere is your country and neighbouring countries. But now the sphere is increasingly "the world".
Multilingualism seems to be somewhat cultural and, more importantly, is something that's passed down from one generation to the next. Older children and adults can (and do) acquire new languages with varying success (some are adept, others are not). It seems like if you don't have this from birth you're kinda screwed. If there's no pressure for you to use another language, you're also kinda screwed.
This comes up particularly in the English speaking world where those countries that have English as the predominant first language tend to have no pressure to use another language nor the cultural heritage of multilingualism.
It seems inevitable to me that the world is heading towards a future with a handful of remaining languages. Obvious candidates include English, Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi and Russian.
I've lived in Germany for a couple years, and have noticed that when native English speakers come here, the Germans all speak to them in English, and when the English speakers go away, the Germans immediately revert back to their native tongue. They can usually do the same for French speakers and sometimes Spanish or Italian too. What this means is that Europeans speak several languages, and English speakers speak one, and therefore English speakers only encounter English.
I suspect the same is true in Iceland, but I have never been there so I can't say for sure.
Literature and music get made even for tiny languages. AAA-video games mostly get made for maybe the top 10 languages; teams from small countries can still make them, but they have to make sure the project has appeal worldwide. Making a Facebook clone with better Icelandic support? Not going to happen.
And if you go to Bing's website https://www.bing.com and set your browser to request webpages in Icelandic (via an "Accept-Language: is" HTTP header), then much of the website changes to Icelandic. However, the search query auto-complete suggestions and the search results will only be in Icelandic if you are in Iceland yourself.
From the article, it seems like the Guardian reporter either didn't know this, or doesn't think Microsoft is important (!):
> Online, however, is the biggest concern. Apart from Google – which, mainly because it has an Icelandic engineer, has added Icelandic speech recognition to its Android mobile operating system – the internet giants have no interest in offering Icelandic options for a population the size of Cardiff’s.
If you mean transfer a feeling then I’d agree it’s possible. Like happy, sad, angry etc.
As for thoughts, I often think in French or English, but for a lot of thoughts, no language is involved. For example, I do not think "I must pay my electricity bill" or "I should do some laundry today".
> “It’s called ‘digital minoritisation’,” said Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, a professor of Icelandic language and linguistics at the University of Iceland. “When a majority language in the real world becomes a minority language in the digital world.”
This makes the phrase "digital minoritisation" seem pretty silly. We should definitely try to protect the heritage of uncommonly spoken languages like Icelandic, Basque, etc. But it's not clear why the plight of Icelandic, a language with its "own country," is particularly deserving of this sort of dramatization.
In my country we have a similar issue except the local language was artificially revived from dead so there's no or almost no unbroken chain of native speakers. There's still debate about how some (English) letters are supposed to be pronounced. They've added useful words, then changed them to sound more authentic. Eg days of the week used to be transliterations from English but now they're references to various native Gods and things. The whole concept of a week didn't exist in the original culture so how can authentic day names exist at all?! It's a big effort with no justification.
It leads to things like this gem of nonsense in an code of practice for electrical work:
"From a Maori perspective, the term “earth” or Papatuanuku translates as Earth Mother – the source of all energy. When aligning this concept to the flow of electricity, a useful parallel can be made to the 3-pin plug."
"Two English scientists were doing an experiment to do with genetics, and the forelimbs and hindlimbs of animals but they couldn't get the results they wanted, they really didn't know what to do, until along came a German scientist, who realized they were using 2 words for forelimb and hindlimb, whereas genetics and does not differentiate, and neither does German. So, bingo, problem solved. If you can't think a thought, you are stuck. But if another language can think a thought, you can learn and achieve so much more."
What if they cannot specify a logical reason, but still feel like it? Isn't that enough?
Do you never feel a joy and pride in following in your parents' footsteps, in having the same traditions as older ancestors, or in feeling the same rain, walking in the same forests, and struggling on the same Earth as many others from generations ancient and recent? It's when I do that that I see them, those who I know have lived, appear from the mist, that I may greet them, be in their midst, and know that I am one of them.
The population of Iceland is 334,252.
It's not clear how many still speak Icelandic, but there's heritage.