Iceland Languages: Difference between revisions

Iceland Languages (view source)

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 ==Description==
-The language, spoken and written is Icelandic. This language is the closest of all the Nordic languages to the Old Norse language (which was spoken throughout early Scandinavia) and has remained relatively unchanged since the twelfth century. Iceland is the most literate nation in the world, with literacy estimated at 99.9%.
+Icelandic is a North Germanic language spoken by about 314,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland where it is the national language. It is most closely related to Faroese and Western Norwegian.
-The dominant language in the period of settlement was Old Norse, the language spoken throughout Scandinavia at that time. Through the centuries it has developed into modern Icelandic, which is spoken throughout Iceland. The records of Iceland are chiefly in Icelandic and Danish; some are in Latin and some in Old Norse.
+The language is more conservative than most other Western European languages. While most of them have greatly reduced levels of inflection (particularly noun declension), Icelandic retains a four-case synthetic grammar (comparable to German, though considerably more conservative and synthetic) and is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Since the written language has not changed much, Icelanders can read classic Old Norse literature created in the 10th through 13th centuries (such as the Eddas and sagas) with relative ease.
+Icelandic is closely related to Faroese; the written forms of the two languages are very similar, but their spoken forms are not mutually intelligible.[2] It is not mutually intelligible with the continental Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) and is more distinct from the most widely spoken Germanic languages, English and German, than those three are. <ref>Wikipedia contributors, "Icelandic language," in ''Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia'', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language, accessed 21 March 2021.</ref>
 ==Word List(s)==