Hear this episode at theallusionist.org/todaytomorrow2
and get part 1 at theallusionist.org/todaytomorrow1
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, shake language’s belly like a bowlful of jelly.
This episode is the second of a two parter about the Icelandic language, how it navigates the challenges of being an old language in the 21st century, and how it obtains new words. You don’t have to have heard part one for this episode to make sense; but when you want to listen, you’ll find it right next door to this one wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of which: podcasters get their own Spotify Wrapped that offers data about such as things as when people listen to your podcast, and I learned you listen to the Allusionist at the turn of New Year. This is very pleasing to me, you’re my kind of people, either you’d listen to a podcast at a party in order to hide from the party, or stay home altogether to listen to podcasts. Well done, well done.
On with the show.
HZ: In 2018, I made an episode of the Allusionist about the Icelandic naming committee, and the laws governing what Icelanders can be named.
SIGURÐUR KONRÁÐSSON: The spirit of the laws is to preserve the old tradition of Icelandic name system. You first have your name, your personal name, in your case Helen. And after that the main rule is to use your father or mother's name, adding -son, in your case -dóttir to your father or mother's name. When your father is called Paul, you would be Paulsdóttir. And your brother would be Paulsson. This is the main rule.
HZ: Since that episode, things have changed.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: There has been a legislation proposal - is that what you call it? What is it? A bill. Okay, so a bill in parliament, and it's been presented several times, of abolishing, for example, the naming committee.
HZ: They're not going to like that.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: No. And that's the reason why it hasn't gone through. So there are really strong forces that really want to keep the naming tradition alive in Iceland.
HZ: Nonetheless, in 2019, the naming laws did change.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: My name is Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir and I'm 31 years old. I am chair of Samtökin ’78, which means the Organization ‘78, the national queer organization of Iceland.
HZ: Samtökin ’78’s work includes education, counselling, legal advice and advocating for the rights and representation of LGBTQIA+ people in Iceland. And that includes campaigning for gender-inclusive language. In 2019, the law changed so that as well as the previously available last name suffixes -son and -dóttir, there was now also a genderfree one, -bur.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Samtökin ’78, the national queer organization, worked with Trans Iceland and Intersex Iceland in forming that legislation that added this suffix to the last names. This specific change to the naming laws that we have - because we do have restrictions on what you can name your children and how you can be named yourself - this happened through a different kind of legislation. So it wasn't really a legislation that was meant to change the name laws. It was just the fact that we added a third gender registration.
HZ: In 2019 the Icelandic government, the Alþingi, unanimously voted to add a third option for legal gender: X, neither male nor female.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Then of course the naming laws had to be updated to suit that need. So that's why -son and -dóttir didn't work anymore, and there had to be added -bur, or the option to just leave son or daughter or child out.
HZ: How did you land on -bur?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: It's actually an old word for son or descendent. It used to be a masculine word, but it sounds like a neuter word to speakers.
HZ: You can only get it though if your official gender is registered as neither male or female, is that right?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Right. Yeah. So we still have these restrictions.
HZ: Is it difficult to change your name in Iceland? So if you were -dóttir before and you wanted -bur.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: I don't think so, no. It used to be, since the law was passed in 2012 on the rights of trans people, you could get a name change and gender marker change after going through the healthcare system. But now it's completely your own decision and you can go to the registry of Iceland and, and have that changed if you wanted. There's just the form that you have to fill in, maybe a process fee or something like that. But yeah, I'd assume it's quite easy. But to be able to change your name, you need to change your gender registration. Yeah. So that's the thing that you need to do first.
HZ: Do you know if many people have applied to change their names to -bur in the last you years?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: I actually don't know. I don't think that many people have. I don't think many people have used -bur. Even though it's such a nice addition to the naming conventions. But I think more nonbinary people are opting to use the last name without the -son or -dóttir, so the patronym or matronym without the -son or -dóttir. We often do this for short - people would maybe refer to me as Þorbjörg Þorvalds instead of Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir - so it sounds, I guess, more natural than using the -bur.
HZ: As well as the new genderfree suffix for last names, the 2019 Gender Autonomy Act brought another big change for first names. To recap the situation as it was in 2018:
HZ: A first name must be male or female, and match the bearer’s gender accordingly - yes, this is a binary gendered system. The name must be on the Personal Names Register, on which there are around 2000 approved names for each gender.
HZ: Well not any more!
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: With the new law, the gender autonomy act: when that passed, all names also became gender neutral. So all first names.
HZ: Was it difficult to get that changed?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: No. It wasn't really a big discussion surrounding this bill. It basically went through and people didn't realize until afterwards because a man in the north of Iceland, his name is Sigurður, or sorry, used to be Sigurður, he is now Sigríður. He was named after his grandmother, but her name was Sigríður, and that is a a woman's name - it has the same ending as the man's name Sigurður, but declines in a different way, so they are of two different grammatical genders. So he was named Sigurður after his grandmother Sigríður, and he opted to change his name to Sigríður that after he found out he could, after the law was passed. And that was like a huge news item and people were - not everybody was happy about it. And that was really really revealing, kind of, to see, because people didn't like that sort of gender-bending. They were like, “So how am I supposed to know the gender of the person I'm talking to, or sending an email to” or whatever?
HZ: What do they want to know?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Exactly. Yeah. Or, well: they need to know because they're gendering their whole language. So that's why we need to know; we need to know how to address people. But we've solved this, at least in email, we can write the pronouns in the signature, and let people know exactly how to address us, if we are comfortable doing that. So this discussion didn't really happen before the law was passed, and this particular change wasn't discussed that much, until after it had passed, and then people were like hey, whoa, what just happened?
HZ: Too late then.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Yeah. But then, two years on, nothing changed, of course. So people still named their children more or less along the gender lines.
HZ: Well, it’s quicker to change language than society, isn’t it.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Yeah. We still of course have the grammatical gender, so we have masculine and feminine, we do have neuter as well. And the names are declined as masculine or feminine names and so on. But now, according to the laws, I could name my daughter with the traditional boy's name without that being a problem, and before, that was not possible. So there have been quite a lot of positive changes in that regard.
HZ: Are there any movements to get rid of all gendering in adjectives, say, just to make that part a bit easier?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: It would be impossible.
HZ: Oh no!
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: I think no - it's not only adjectives, it’s also pronouns, other types of pronouns, so it's not just the personal pronouns, but like, referential pronouns and so on. So all of it is gendered. In Icelandic, everything is gendered, so even sometimes saying hello can be gendered. So I guess our situation is much more difficult in a sense.
HZ: Like a lot of languages, Icelandic has three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. If you’ve listened to this show for a long time, specifically No Title, you’ll know I’m not a fan of grammatical gender: a) if you’re not male or female, but those are the only options in the language to describe yourself, every adjective is a bird flip from the lexicon. b) because grammatical gender takes up brain space that I need for essential functions like not falling over, I don’t see why it’s useful and why is it even here??
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: There used to be two genders, or that's what people think: the inanimate and then the animate. So usually that's how gender systems are set up, there's the animate, inanimate distinction, or the male, female, maybe inanimate distinction. But people think that the feminine and the masculine evolved out of the masculine. So the masculine would be the animal animate gender that changed into the feminine and masculine. And then we kept the neuter as the inanimate. Whoa, did I make sense? I'm not sure if that made sense.
HZ: I mean, it doesn't make sense in a philosophical level, but you made sense explaining it.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Yeah. All right. So this is just the way that language wants to organize itself somehow.
HZ: yeah. Well it doesn't do it on its own.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Of course it doesn't. But yeah, we’re dealing with old times here. It’s something that's hard to change, but if we would remove gendering completely from Icelandic, we wouldn't be able to understand the texts from ten years ago. It would just completely uproot it. So it's impossible to do that. So we have to work around it. Fortunately, we're not in the same situation as, for example, you know, Spanish, where they have masculine and feminine; in Icelandic, at least we do have the neuter that we can use, even though we're not used to using it for human beings - or for individual human beings - we can still use it. So we can change it and we can use it to suit our purposes. And that's a really good thing.
HZ: Hitherto, in Icelandic, the neuter usually wouldn’t be used to refer to human beings, but now increasingly it is.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: We can use neuter for people. It doesn't come naturally to us though. So people have to practice, because the neuter traditionally is only used to refer to - well, some neutral words do represent the people, like for example the word ‘child’, but in general, when we're talking about the individuals, we use either masculine or feminine. So it's new to use neuter for for people, for specific individuals. So this is change that is happening right now. And it's really fascinating to watch it happen. I don't know if it's going to happen in Icelandic or not - but for example, in Swedish and Norwegian and Danish - well, not everywhere in Norway, because they also have three genders somewhere, ok so let's say Danish and Swedish: there, they now have two genders, neuter and then the masculine-feminine gender, where the two have merged into one. So tthere's an animistic distinction now, or, well, an animistic distinction for nouns that denote human beings, and then you can also have the two genders on random objects.
HZ: Is there enough vocabulary in Icelandic for different queer identities?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: I'd say there is now. It's not complete, of course, because of course new identities and new words are being made, formed, all the time, are coined all the time. So we're trying to keep up. Six years ago we had a neologism contest where we try to find words for all sorts of different different identities, bigender or genderqueer and so on. And we found quite a few, or some of these ideas were chosen. Not all of them have gotten into the mainstream yet. And I guess they won't, if it hasn't happened yet; there are a few words that I'm not sure are going to be used for much longer.
HZ: Like what?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Like, for example, frjálsgerva for gender fluid. I think people are usually just using genderfluid, they prefer the English term. And of course that's just what needs to happen. If the suggestion isn't good enough, then that's where it stops. If the grassroots don't want a word that has been chosen, in a sense, then of course It's not going to be used. There was never the intention either to tell people, tell queer people what words to use. It was more like giving them the tools to talk about themselves in Icelandic. And if they want to use it, then they do. If it doesn't suit them, then of course it's absolutely the communities’ choice.
HZ: ‘Queer’ in English has so many different applications. In Icelandic, do you have multiple different words that you would translate to queer in English, or one that works in the same way?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: We mainly use one, mainly we use hinsegin, which used to be an adverb and is now used as an adjective as well. Hinsegin actually means ‘the other way’. So it's this way or the other way or something like that. So it means the other way. And it used to be sort of a slur, it's a word that we reclaimed.
HZ: Speaking of slurs: there’s an older Icelandic word meaning ‘homosexual’ that is pretty negative.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Kinvillingur. It’s almost like sexual deviant or something like that. Gender or sex wildling.
HZ: Wildling is quite nice!
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Yeah. But kinvillingur is someone that strays from the beaten path. This is a really, really negative term. We decided - or people, I guess, the community, people that are older than me - decided not to reclaim that word. Not in the public discourse at least. But sometimes we do like affectionately talk about ourselves as kinvillingur. But that is like an in-community, like an in-group speak, something that I wouldn't want to be referred to by somebody else.
HZ: Otherwise, here are alternate words:
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Samkynhneigð, which means homosexual. It sounds a bit formal. So people usually, or at least I usually want to use hommi for gay man and lesbía, lesbian. Hommi and lesbía.
HZ: it sounds like there's a loan word in there: lesbian has crept into Icelandic then.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Oh yeah, yeah. Lesbía. And also hommi of course is also derived from homosexual. People had to fight for these words, to be able to use these words, for example, on the radio and so on, they wanted to advertise the nights that they had, and the services that my organization had in the 1980s. And the national broadcasting company wanted them to use the kinvillingur term in the name of language preservation, I believe.
HZ: It's more important than people, right?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Of course! But in the end they were allowed to use these words.
HZ: Other linguistic progress has been made with the addition of a genderfree pronoun hán.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: So I'd say this pronoun hán has taken off. It's in use; most people have at least knowledge of its existence. Not everybody knows exactly how to use it, but people are trying to learn, and we are promoting its use. So it’s taking off. And journalists, for example, have started using it correctly and have been doing that for quite some time now.
HZ: Then hopefully it will catch on with other people, if they're reading it.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Yeah. I think that of course helps. Of course it matters what we do, and it matters, for example, what words I use in the media. And then people that are around nonbinary people have no problem in using it. So it's being used in the language community, but just maybe not exactly everywhere.
The biggest issue is of course getting the words out there, letting people know that they exist; and then whether or not they get used is completely up to people themselves. We did have to fight to get hán, for example, into some of the some of the dictionaries, the online dictionaries that are available for Icelandic. So there have been some emails going back and forth and some activists sending emails and so on.
HZ: Could be worse.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Yeah, it hasn't been a huge fight. But still there's some resistance, I guess, because they wanted to see whether or not it caught on. Because you were asking how you get how you get words to to succeed, that's of course one of the things, that they are there when people go looking for them. So if somebody uses hán and you want to know what it means, you need to be able to look it up and see it from an official source and then see it from somebody or like an institution or something that is respected in Iceland. And then I guess it's more likely that the grandmother of a nonbinary child is going to go ahead and use a word that the Árnastofnun, the Árni Magnússon Institute has kind of said is ok, do you know what I mean?
HZ: Did it mean anything before it was this pronoun?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: No, it’s completely new.
HZ: That's exciting.
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Yeah. There's an ongoing debate about gender neutrality in language use. And that has been going on for at least twenty years, but I think there's renewed power, maybe in the past two years or so. So after our Gender Autonomy Act was passed in 2019, because now suddenly especially non-binary people are more in the limelight and are more visible and so on, so I think that has something to do with it. But this is also just a discussion that is very multifaceted and it has to do with more than just queer people. It's also about women's visibility in the language, because our gender system is made up in the way that there's a masculine default when you speak about human beings, as there is in many languages, So people are trying to use the neuter plural, which is how you talk about mixed groups of people. So there are intricacies and many things to be discussed. But yeah, it's somewhat polarized though. Of course there's backlash to it, and people want to preserve Icelandic or don't like being told that their language or their language use is somehow wrong or hurting other people. I think it also has to do with people not wanting to be told that they are homophobic or misogynistic or something for not knowing how to use this standard neutral language, because if you've grown up with Icelandic as it was traditionally spoken, it is quite the change to use the gender neutral language. And people don't want to be accused of something that maybe isn't true. So people get afraid and you know how it is, people start arguing… But I think we've managed, or at least we're trying, to frame it more as a challenge and also as a viability thing. We know that young nonbinary kids, for example, are speaking English to try to get rid of all of the gendering in Icelandic. We have a strong tradition for language preservation and so on, so that's something we can also use to get people to embrace this change.
HZ: Interesting. So it's either change the Icelandic or Icelandic will make itself obsolete. Those are the options?
ÞORBJÖRG ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR: Yeah. This is what is happening, so we need to face it. But it's true that change can happen fast here. And it's really good if we can get the changes through here, that can be an inspiration for other other countries or other places in the world. That would be really nice.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
deltiologist, noun: a person who collects postcards as a hobby.
Try using ‘deltiologist’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. You heard from Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir, chair of Samtökin ’78, the national queer organization of Iceland. 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 in 2022, contact them at multitude.productions/ads.
Find @allusionistshow on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and follow for big update on the gravestone I talked about in No Title, the one with supposedly the earliest known written instance of Ms - I found it, I went to it, and discovered something shocking!
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