Iceland Has a Word for It
I hand the agent my brottfarerspjald, step on board Icelandair Flight 642. Just before takeoff, the flight attendant stands before us clasping a seat-belt buckle and droning through the oryggisbunadur um bord. Some five hours later, we begin our descent into Reykjavik. At the airport, I get my passport stamped at vagabraeftirlit, make a quick refresher stop in the snyrtingar, exchange dollars for kronurs at the gjaldeyrir and pick up tourist information at the upplysingapjonustu fyrir feroafolk.
I have come to this nation of 280,000 inhabitants, who speak to each other in a language that is incomprehensible to 19,999 of every 20,000 people on Earth, to see how they are holding up against the onslaught of English. Iceland's linguistic patriots go to incredible lengths to preserve their language. Foreign words are ruthlessly screened out by a special agency, which also invents words for new things and ideas. There's a word for everything in Icelandic -- or there will be shortly.
Icelanders have a strong belief in their own national greatness, and that conviction is rooted unshakably in language and words. Literacy isn't a problem here; it's a given. Icelanders believe that men and women should turn a verse as easily as they turn a profit, and both endeavors are considered important to one's well-being.
Iceland has more bookstores per capita than any other nation in the world ("better shoeless than bookless" is an unofficial national motto). Sales of a new novel in Iceland will compare favorably with sales for a similar book in Britain -- while a volume of poetry would do even better in Iceland -- with a population about 1/200th that of Britain.
The most important tomes are the sagas. Written in the 12th and 13th centuries, these are the great prose narratives of medieval Iceland, bloodthirsty tales of Viking derring-do. Icelandic schoolchildren read their national literature exactly as it was written hundreds of years ago. Modern Icelanders speak virtually the same language as their forefathers of the 10th century. Tomorrow morning's Reykjavik newspapers will be written in the same language as the ancient sagas -- that would be like this newspaper using Chaucerian English.
Language preservation worked nicely for centuries because Icelanders lived diphthongs apart from the rest of the world, but in recent decades the cultural floodgates have been opened. English is everywhere -- on televisions, VCRs, the Internet and commercial products.
