From WikiLang
 Icelandic pages
|
|---|
| Introduction · Adpositions · Articles · Irregular verbs · Lexicon · Numbers · Pronouns · Sounds and Writing · Verbs · Vocab |
| Germanic Languages | |
|---|---|
| Eastern Germanic |  Gothic
|
| Northern Germanic |  Danish ·  Faroese · Icelandic ·  Norwegian (Bokmål) · Norwegian (Nynorsk) ·  Old Norse ·  Swedish
|
| Western Germanic |  Afrikaans ·  Dutch ·  English ·  Frisian ·  German ·  Old English
|
An Introduction to the Language
History
Icelandic is one of the Western Scandinavian languages, a family shared with Faroese and Norwegian. Norwegian is however heavy influenced from the other continental Scandinavian languages so it’s more similar to those than to Icelandic and Faroese. These languages developed from a western dialect of Old Norse, and as such are related to the continental Scandinavian languages, however do not have as much mutual intelligibility with them as they do with each other.
Icelandic has had little influence from outside languages, in part due to the isolated nature of the country, but more because of a policy of language purism that has developed since the 18th century. Thus Icelandic still retains many of the characteristics of Old Norse that have diminished amongst the other Scandinavian languages, the main one of these being the inflectional grammar.
Family
Indo-European
- Germanic
- North Germanic
- West Scandinavian
- Icelandic
- West Scandinavian
- North Germanic
Spoken in
Icelandic is the official language of Iceland, where it has about 320,000 speakers. It’s also spoken in Denmark and by the descendants of the Icelandic immigration wave to North America, called vesturíslendingar (western Icelanders).
