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Iceland has been a very isolated and linguistically homogeneous island historically, but has nevertheless been home to several languages. Gaelic was the native language to many of the early Icelanders. Although the Icelandic or Norse language prevails, northern trade routes brought German, English, Dutch, French and Basque to Iceland. Some ...
Icelandic (/ aɪ s ˈ l æ n d ɪ k / ⓘ eyess-LAN-dik; endonym: íslenska, pronounced [ˈistlɛnska] ⓘ) is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken by about 314,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland, where it is the national language. [2]
Among Iceland's dialects, this feature is the most common surviving deviation from the standard dialect. Furthermore, in Þingeyjarsýsla and northeast Iceland, the sequences mp nt nk lp lk ðk within a morpheme before a vowel may retain a voiced pronunciation of their first consonant and a postaspirated pronunciation of their second consonant ...
The history of the Icelandic language began in the 9th century when the settlement of Iceland, mostly by Norwegians, brought a dialect of Old Norse to the island. The oldest preserved texts in Icelandic were written around 1100, the oldest single text being Íslendingabók followed by Landnámabók .
It might have developed in Westfjords, where manuscripts were written in the language, but since it had influences from many other European languages, it is more likely that it was created elsewhere and brought to Iceland by Basque sailors. [3] Basque entries are mixed with words from Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. The Basque ...
The letters Eth ( ð , capital Ð ), transliterated as d , and Thorn ( þ , capital Þ ), transliterated as th , are widely used in the Icelandic language. Eth is also used in Faroese and Elfdalian, while thorn was used in many historical languages such as Old English.
Even if the language policy of Norway has been more tolerant of rural dialectal variation in formal language, the prestige dialect often referred to as "Eastern Urban Norwegian", spoken mainly in and around the Oslo region, is sometimes considered normative. The influence of a standard Norwegian is nevertheless less so than in Denmark and ...
Each language is assigned a two-letter (set 1) and three-letter lowercase abbreviation (sets 2–5). [2] Part 1 of the standard, ISO 639-1 defines the two-letter codes, and Part 3 (2007), ISO 639-3 , defines the three-letter codes, aiming to cover all known natural languages , largely superseding the ISO 639-2 three-letter code standard.