Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/todaytomorrow1
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, left language at my ex-boyfriend’s sister’s house about twelve years ago and people are still talking about it.
This episode is the first of a pair about the Icelandic language, the challenges it’s currently facing, and how new words are coined and added to the lexicon, because there’s an official process, it’s not like English where nobody decides whether or not a new word is allowed, which is how we wound up with ‘webinar’.
On with the show.
HZ: The Icelandic language is spoken by about 320,000 people, most of them in Iceland, a few thousand in Denmark and a smattering elsewhere. It evolved from a western Norse dialect, after Norwegians settled in the country towards the end of the 9th century, and although it diverged from Norwegian language thereafter, Icelandic has stayed recognisably similar to this earlier form for many centuries, particularly since 1780 when students proposed a policy of linguistic purism, to protect Icelandic language from the encroachment of words from other languages, such as Danish, French and English, and to weed out ones that had already landed there, replacing them with ones constructed from Icelandic elements or repurposed old words. In 1964, the Icelandic government established the Icelandic Language Council and in 1985 the Icelandic Language Institute, which is now part of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. These organisations are tasked with advising on language, providing guidelines and dealing with questions from the public, and deciding new vocabulary in Icelandic.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: My name is Ágústa Þorbergsdóttir, I'm a project manager at the Institute.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: My name is Jóhannes Bjarni Sigtryggsson and I'm an assistant research professor at the institute and the language planning department, and mainly specialise in orthography and things of that type, but also like Ágústa, work in part on terminology.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Language planning also.
HZ: What kind of things does language planning cover?
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: The most important thing is maybe what is Ágústa's main job, working with terminological committees in many special fields, for example engineering or sports or chemistry or whatever, work with specialists in each field and try to make terminological lists of their fields, translations of these common words that are used, special words used in these different fields. And this is a part of language preservation and planning because we are helping people to find icelandic words for usually English words that are are used in many of these fields.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Yes. Because of the official language policy, Icelandic is usable and used in all fields of society. In one sentence.
HZ: That’s a big job! How many people are on the committee?
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: That differs.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Yeah, there are many committees, but they can't be from just one person or two, might be 10 of them.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Yes. That's unusual. Three, five persons is usual.
HZ: Is it difficult to agree?
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: No. It’s usually voluntary work.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Some of them have incredible history history. For example, the electrical engineering committee has worked for eighty years and people have, at least in earlier years, met once every week. Didn't get anything for it; published fifteen volumes of translations. People thought it was their duty for the language. It is also a new field that they exerted themselves on this. And it is very difficult for example in fields like electric engineering, because there are of course a lot of international words, for example, like the radio or signal or something, but people didn't want to use these international words.
So for example, ‘signal’ is used in nearly every language for signal. But we have merki, is the icelandic word for it.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: The word for 'television' is sjónvarp. It is combined of two words: sjón, vision, and varp, from the verb varpa.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: To throw. Throwing of sight or vision, television.
HZ: So quite a literal translation of the latin and Greek, isn't it?
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Okay. Yes. Garage is bílskúr. It's from bíl, that's a car, and skúr is a shed.
HZ: Makes sense.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: So yeah. It's to see easier for us to understand than the loan words.
HZ: These are calques, translating the parts of the word in the other language. They’re also compounds, uniting two words - although not blending them, Icelandic does not make many portmanteau words. There are a few though, such as the word for computer, tolva, made from the word ‘tala’, a number, and ‘volva’, a female seer.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: The seeress, the mysterious seeress. So, yes, it's probably a portmanteau, where you put tala and volva together. So it's a number that sees into the future, really. So something like that.
HZ: Seems like a very creative choice for a computer to be a seer.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Yeah. And usually these learned neologisms, like tolva, are made in these committees, not by maybe the common man, because they sometimes use words that are archaic in Icelandic, or less common. Usually words like that are not made by just happenstance, it's often made by the committees.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: A newer example is hrutskyring, mansplaining.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Yeah, it was a brilliant word because there was a lot of discussion about mansplaining, which is pretty common in most societies.
HZ: The Icelandic word for ‘mansplaining’ translates as ‘ramsplaining’. Like the original, it’s a portmanteau, but there’s also a bonus pun in there.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: That's hrútar, ram, and explaining.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: The word for explanation is utskyring. So you add in front of it H and R.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: H R, that’s Mr Explaining.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: It becomes hrutskyring.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Hrutskyring, Mr Explaining, herra utskyring.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Hrútar also means a ram, a male sheep, so in many ways it's a very funny word.
HZ: What's the internet called in Icelandic?
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Internet.
HZ: Oh no, I'm sorry! A loan word crept in!
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Yes. Loan words are of course, very common, also.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Yes, we have many loan words.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: But there were some suggestions around 2000, before 2000, when the internet became famous, for example, lýðnet was one suggestion, made from of course the last part ‘net’, and lýðr, as in population, lýð, like we have the word lýðræði, which is democracy in Iceland. Lýð is the people and ræði is to choose or decide themselves.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Well, some people use the word alnet, but not too many.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Yeah, no. Often there are many examples or numerous suggestions for new things, these common things; like when the mobile phone came, there were 20 or 30 suggestions.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Also for app.
HZ: What did you choose?
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: App. But we had maybe 40 suggestions.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: It fits well in Icelandic, app. And in plural, it's öpp, so you can conjugate it, decline it and so on. But the problem is it is becoming harder in later years, if you are not quick, to find the short and a good word for these new things, then it becomes really difficult. In different fields, you have to get the specialist in each field that know the system, because you not only have to find Icelandic words, but you have to think about them in a whole system of terminological systems or branches, but it's not possible to do it, except if you're a specialist in the field.
HZ: What do you do when a loan word is being used quite widely instead of the Icelandic word? How do you promote Icelandic vocabulary when there are all these loan words coming in all the time?
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: We spread the terms in a special term bank.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: It's called í Íðorðabankinn, term bank.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Everyone can send a new word.
HZ: Everyone? Wow!
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Yes, everyone.
HZ: So there’s a term bank where people can find all the formal words that the dozens of different committees coin for such things as technical work, but there’s another with words submitted by the populace, for common things they think Icelandic needs a term for.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: In the term bank, the terms are the terms from the terminological committees, but the other one is from the population.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: It’s very interesting to see how people think about this. And, many are very proud of their new words. So people can look at it, this is open, and some of them become common immediately, as the word hrutskyring I mentioned; but it has been a problem spreading the knowledge about new words often.
HZ: What form did the term bank take before it was a website? Was it printed in books?
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Yes, it was printed in books.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: For example, in the electrical engineering, they published 15 volumes of electrical engineering words. There was also published books in many other fields, like bílaorð, car words, and so on. But in many fields, nothing was published really until the website came around, then people could put their words there and there was a centralized website.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Yes. The website is from 1997.
HZ: One thing that sometimes happens with the new vocabulary for specialist fields is that booklets are published with lists of the words, and they’re distributed to university students.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: The best thing is to get the word lists to the students that become the scholars that write about these things, of course, so they can write about it also in Icelandic.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Write about it, talk about it, use the words.
HZ: People also sometimes come to the Language Planning Department when they need help coming up with a new word, or they’re having trouble finding a translation that suits. Of course, it can be hard to please everybody.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Yeah, it can be difficult. And often it is a common refrain, when people see words that these committees make is that they are too long or too complicated or something. People usually say, why can't you make a very short word?
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: And also transparent.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: And also transparent where we can see the meaning of every constituent word! But that's difficult to do. People mention words like tolva and sími for telephone.
HZ: And also now commonly used to mean mobile phone, an abbreviation of farsími, wherein the ‘far’ means to move.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Or þyrla for helicopter.
HZ: From the verb to swirl.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Þota for jet plane.
HZ: From a verb to rush.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: But these words are anomalies, because it's very difficult to make these short words that contain all the meanings somehow. But you try to make a word that it's as short as possible, of course, but there must be some reference or connection to the meaning of course. This really can be an art form trying to do this.
HZ: Are the people ever angry at the committees about words that they want to use and can't, or words that you've introduced and they don't like?
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: No?
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: But the problem is more that the spreading of knowledge about the words, this is always an uphill battle I think. Even though we have the booklets and the websites and so on, it's difficult. And also there’s a lot of teaching in English, at least in some fields. And so some teachers don't think they need to use these words because they are always teaching in English. So it's an uphill battle.
HZ: What other things do you do to keep the Icelandic language alive? If it's an uphill battle?
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: At the department here, we also published orthographical dictionaries, and we have a website with education about language instructions, about ‘correct language’ if we may, and so on. But we also work with or help the Icelandic Language Council, which is a committee that more broadly thinks about language policy, say, and publishes language policy documents, and helps the government making language laws, like there were, for example, in 2011 were first language laws published in Iceland.
HZ: What kind of things were those for?
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: For example before that, there hadn't been anything in the laws or about the state to solve Icelandic. People didn't think it was necessary to say anything, because Icelandic was the substrate. We didn't really think about it. But now, for example, it says in the laws that Iceland is the language used in government and in courts and other official business and so on. So that's the thing that protects the language. People thought that at that time that it was necessary to mention that Icelandic was the language of the country. But earlier, its position was so stable that people don't think about it, which says something.
HZ: What happened to make it unstable, and when?
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: I think it's mainly the influence of this computer revolution, of course, the internet. Also, in the last 40 years probably, there has been an enormous influx of shows and movies from America and so on. But also in later years it has been also the tourist boom, there have been a lot more tourists than before. And with them have come a lot of foreigners working here, of course, and there have arisen many problems in that because how to get Icelandic, for example, on the main streets, there's a lot of signs here with only English, and get people to learn Icelandic that work here and so on. From many sides, so it's not one thing.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: The influence of English has grown in recent years, yes.
HZ: Has it been difficult to keep people speaking Icelandic rather than foreign languages like English?
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Do you mean the population, normal people?
HZ: The population, yeah.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: ‘Normal' people. The population.
HZ: What is normal, who knows?
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Well, there have been some studies, in very recent years, of the influence of English, for example, on children and this digital influence from the phones and the internet and so on. There are some signs that Icelandic is weak, very weak, with the younger population. Youngsters even sometimes speak English between themselves, at least in spurts. So that doesn't sound good. It is cool to use English speaking with your friends or so on.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: I think that’s part of it, it’s cool. They use YouTube, see Netflix, use iPads with English, and don't read many books.
HZ: Are you worried about Icelandic, or do you think it will be okay?
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Maybe a little worried, yes.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Yeah. Yes. So it's a dangerous period now, I think.
HZ: You need an Icelandic person to invent the next Netflix, so that then all the kids are using that instead.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: Yes, that's one thing that's a big problem is for example, Netflix and Hulu, Hulu, and all this. Icelandic television has the subtitles everywhere. But in Netflix and these things, international things that are often very often lacking subtitles for Icelandic. You don't think about it if you're English-speaking, but there is lacking a lot of languages in this, and you can always get English subtitles, but rarely for Icelandic. The culture minister has written to Apple and Netflix and voiced her displeasure about this. But here maybe automatic translation could help later, at least we could get some basic translation and everything in Icelandic. Also the government has put a lot of money in recent years into a language technology project, where they put a lot of money into making these corpora, these texts databases and all these things, and also producing automatic translators and correction software and so on.
So there are lots of specialists working on this exactly now, hopefully this will help, because in the beginning, this was all doom and gloom. But if we can get through the worst hurdles with this and get all these basic things correct, then these language technology, software and so on, will help the language, if it can be put to use. So in the beginning it was difficult for Icelandic, but if we can get through this, then the language technology should help. The problem is, of course, as you mentioned, we are only three hundred and something thousand, but we have to build the infrastructure and it's very labour-expensive and costs a lot of money to make these corpora that make automatic translations possible, or things like that.
So there's this problem is, you can look at it as: Iceland, there are very few people that live here, but it's a large country. It's 103,000 square kilometers, and we have to build roads through the country, but we're only 300,000. It's a lot of roads and the infrastructure for this. It's the same with the language. We have to build the infrastructure for the future, and it doesn't cost much less than for English to do this. So this is a problem.
HZ: Although the Icelandic writing system is mostly the Roman alphabet, it has a few characters that programmers tend not to take into account, like vowels with diacritics on top, and the letters ash, thorn and eth - ash is the one that looks like an a and e stuck together (ae), thorn is like if lower case p and b refused to get out of each other’s way (þ), and eth is a curvaceous D with a crossbar (ð). Thorn and eth are both th sounds. English used to have these letters too, but when the printing press arrived in England from mainland Europe in the 15th century, it wasn’t set up for those, so they were replaced with other letters such as Y. Hence any shop sign that reads Ye Old Shoppe is actually The. And all these hundreds of years later, technology still has it in for thorn and eth, because programming tends to happen using the English alphabet. So how do you use Icelandic online when if you try to use a thorn in a web address, you’ll break the internet but not in the sexy way?
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: That's mainly a concern, for example, for the names of websites and programming languages that don't have the Icelandic special letters,. But we can use Icelandic letters on the net, of course, and everything connected to that. There was a battle in 1980-something, there was some standard organization that decided what signs or letters should be in the - I think - ASCII or the ANSI or some of these, code sets. And there was a battle, that some Icelanders fought, for keeping þ and ð in the basic small simple set. We had to fight for that. And then some, I think, Turkish symbols were ousted instead of them, because there was a limited number of symbols that could fit in these older character sets. But with the Unicode now, there is nearly infinite number of symbols that can be in that. So that's no problem anymore. But the biggest problem is domains, preserving, for example, that Icelandic is used in computer science, because it has been shown in studies that if, if language loses domains, then it is very difficult to turn back.
HZ: It would be pretty sad if a couple of decades of domains rendered Icelandic obsolete. The language has hung on for such a long time in the same form that Icelandic people today can read texts from many hundreds of years ago.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Yes. We can.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: You can say it's the same language.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: Morphological.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: At least, the pronounciation has changed and so on, but the structure, the declensions and everything has kept mostly the same through the centuries.
ÁGÚSTA ÞORBERGSDÓTTIR: That’s been stable.
JÓHANNES BJARNI SIGTRYGGSSON: When people talk about Icelandic, it's like a small language, but it's not totally true, because as you mentioned, we can understand with very little difficulty old texts from the beginning of writing in Iceland. So I can read one of the older manuscript from around 1200 fairly easily. And this makes it so if we think of Icelandic as the language of Icelandic through the centuries, then it becomes a much larger language than just people that live now. So there's some access that we have, to think through centuries. So we're in unity with all Icelanders from the beginning. Which is amazing. If the language becomes lost, it would be a terrible shame: we will lose this close connection with older generations, but also for the cultural world, because we are really speaking a living old language, which is nearly as if we still had people speaking Latin as a mother tongue. So it would be a shame. But the problem is, some Icelanders look at language as this art artifact or archaic thing. And in our work and the work of the Language Council, we are trying to get it to show that it's not only that, it's also a living language, that is very useful and very complete.
HZ: You heard from Ágústa Þorbergsdóttir and Jóhannes Bjarni Sigtryggsson from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. And next episode we go further into how this all works - plus an update on what we talked about three years ago in the Name V. Law episode about Icelandic naming customs. So return for that.
The Allusionist is an independent podcast bobbing around in the turbulent seas of online content. If you like this show, tell someone about it - I love it when you do. I feel awkward doing it myself; I was having an eye test the other day and the optician asked me what I do for a living, which is always a bit cringe for me because when you say you’re a podcaster, a lot of people immediately think you sit in your garage shouting self-indulgently for three hours because you love the sound of their own voice. A) I don’t have a garage; B) I hate the sound of my own voice. There are so many different kinds of podcaster! Anyway the optician said she was going to recommend the Allusionist to her mum who’s an English teacher, and then showed me some nice pictures of my retinas. Please do recommend the show to someone who you think might enjoy it, pictures of retinas optional.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
jouk, verb, Scottish or Northen English: turn or bend quickly to avoid something.
Try using jouk in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com and the experimental podcast Neutrino Watch. Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor an episode of the show, contact them at multitude.productions/ads.
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