The language of the sagas is Old Icelandic, a western dialect of Old Norse. The most famous of the texts, which were written in Iceland from the 12th century onward, are the sagas of Icelanders, which encompass the historical works and the Poetic Edda. Many of the texts are based on poetry and laws traditionally preserved orally. The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100 AD. Main article: History of Icelandic A page from the Landnámabók, an early Icelandic manuscript Since 1995, on 16 November each year, the birthday of 19th-century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson is celebrated as Icelandic Language Day. The Icelandic Language Council, comprising representatives of universities, the arts, journalists, teachers, and the Ministry of Culture, Science and Education, advises the authorities on language policy. The state-funded Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies serves as a centre for preserving the medieval Icelandic manuscripts and studying the language and its literature. Since the written language has not changed much, Icelandic speakers can read classic Old Norse literature created in the 10th through 13th centuries (such as the Eddas and sagas) with relative ease.Īside from the 300,000 Icelandic speakers in Iceland, Icelandic is spoken by about 8,000 people in Denmark, 5,000 people in the United States, and more than 1,400 people in Canada, notably in the region known as New Iceland in Manitoba which was settled by Icelanders beginning in the 1880s. Icelandic vocabulary is also deeply conservative, with the country's language regulator maintaining an active policy of coining terms based on older Icelandic words rather than directly taking in loanwords from other languages. While most of them have greatly reduced levels of inflection (particularly noun declension), Icelandic retains a four- case synthetic grammar (comparable to German, though considerably more conservative and synthetic) and is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. The language is more conservative than most other Germanic languages. The written forms of the two languages are very similar, but their spoken forms are not mutually intelligible.
It is not mutually intelligible with the continental Scandinavian languages ( Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) and is more distinct from the most widely spoken Germanic languages, English and German.
Due to being a West Scandinavian language, it is most closely related to Faroese, western Norwegian dialects, and the extinct language Norn. Icelandic ( / aɪ s ˈ l æ n d ɪ k/ ( listen) Icelandic: íslenska pronounced ( listen)) is a North Germanic language spoken by about 314,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland, where it is the national language. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Iceland, where Icelandic is the language of the majority
0 kommentar(er)
