Icelandic language

the language of the Icelanders, related to the West Scandinavian subgroup of the Scandinavian group of Germanic languages.

Icelandic is spoken in Iceland (by about 200,000 persons) and among the Icelandic settlers in North America (about 40,000 persons). The oldest linguistic records are the skaldic poems of the ninth century, written down in the 13th century, and the oldest manuscripts date from the late 12th century. The Icelandic language of the 12th and 13th centuries was almost indistinguishable from Old Norwegian. Since then important phonetic changes have occurred in Icelandic, for example, the disappearance of nasal vowels, diphthongization of long vowels, transformation of length from a quality of vowels to a quality of syllables, and the appearance of preaspiration; its morphology—rich in inflectional forms—has remained almost unchanged. The modern orthography, developed in the early 19th century, is very similar to that of Old Icelandic. Its rich literary tradition enabled Icelandic to remain a literary language even in the period of Danish rule lasting from the late 14th to the early 20th century. The first printed books appeared in the 16th century. There are almost no loanwords in modern Icelandic; new concepts are expressed by means of word-building, suffixal word-formation, and the use of old words in a special modern sense. The language has almost no dialect differences.