The title is the original title from the Guardian article, but does not match the content accurately. The fundamental problem is that Icelandic is a small language, and English-language media is already dominating. This puts Icelandic in danger of dying. Now, AI threatens to accelerate that process, especially since of all things the AI company Anthropic is now working with teachers to provide teaching material for them:
“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”.
Katrín has said that Iceland has been “quite proactive” in pushing for AI to be usable in Icelandic. Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with Iceland’s ministry of education, one of the world’s first national AI education pilots. The partnership is a nationwide pilot across Iceland – giving hundreds of teachers across Iceland access to AI tools.
I’d be more worried about Irish (also the official language of a sovereign nation, though sharing that status with English, in which most business is transacted), not to mention Welsh (similar status, only its nation is effectively part of an entity named England And Wales, which is part of the UK, and it’s possible to live in Cardiff without ever feeling one needs to know any Welsh, to say nothing of the picturesque villages where second homes owned by well-off English people are crowding out locals).
Icelandic, meanwhile, is the sole official language of Iceland. Most people there speak reasonable English, though don’t do so among themselves, and if you rent anything beyond an Airbnb or fill in a tax return, you’ll be doing do in Icelandic. Also, Iceland has a healthy literary culture, with a thriving publishing industry and a tradition of giving books (almost certainly in Icelandic) for Christmas, to the point where the spurt of newly published books near the end of the year is called the jolabokhlaup (sp?), or “Christmas book flood”.
I’d say that Icelandic is perhaps marginally less secure than, say, Swedish, though fears of its replacement by English belong alongside 20th-century panics that TV/radio/rock’n’roll will give children in (Britain/Australia/New Zealand/wherever) American accents.
Hey I don’t believe you about jolabokhlaup (Jólabókaflóð?), there’s not nearly enough syllables for an Icelandic word 😂 it’s only, like, five syllables for crying out loud
