Iceland’s former prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, has said that the Icelandic language could be wiped out in as little as a generation due to the sweeping rise of AI and encroaching English language dominance.
Katrín, who stood down as prime minister last year to run for president after seven years in office, said Iceland was undergoing “radical” change when it came to language use. More people are reading and speaking English, and fewer are reading in Icelandic, a trend she says is being exacerbated by the way language models are trained.
She made the comments before her appearance at the Iceland Noir crime fiction festival in Reykjavík after the surprise release of her second novel of the genre, which she co-wrote with Ragnar Jónasson.
“A lot of languages disappear, and with them dies a lot of value[and] a lot of human thought,” she said. Icelandic has only about 350,000 speakers and is among the world’s least-altered languages.
“Having this language that is spoken by so very few, I feel that we carry a huge responsibility to actually preserve that. I do not personally think we are doing enough to do that,” she said, not least because young people in Iceland “are absolutely surrounded by material in English, on social media and other media”.
Saying the issue here is AI seems like nonsense to me. The issue is that not many tools localize to Icelandic. LLMs are just some of those tools.
Anyway, languages rise and fall. Hell, Hawaiian was practically extinct at one point and nearly entirely undocumented. Hebrew was extinct for over 1000 years before being revived.
To me anyway, what’s most important is documentation. As long as the shift is organic, the rise and fall of languages doesn’t bother me at all. Let’s just make sure that the languages are very well documented so that the languages are never forgotten. They are one of the most important aspects of cultures, after all.
