Tuesday 25 April 2017

Icelanders Seek to Keep Their Language Alive and Out of ‘the Latin Bin’

Icelanders Seek to Keep Their Language Alive and Out of ‘the Latin Bin’

The people of Iceland, a rugged North Atlantic island settled by Norsemen about 1,100 years ago, have a unique dialect of Old Norse that has adapted to life at the edge of the Arctic. Hundslappadrifa, for example, means “heavy snowfall with large flakes occurring in calm wind.” But the revered Icelandic language, seen by many as a source of identity and pride, is being undermined by the widespread use of English, both in the tourism industry and in the voice-controlled artificial intelligence devices coming into vogue.

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