Icelandic (
íslenska (help·info)) is a
North Germanic language, the language of
Iceland. Its closest relatives are
Faroese and certain
Norwegian dialects such as
Telemark dialect and
Sognamål.
While most West European languages have greatly reduced levels of inflection, particularly in regards to noun declension, Icelandic retains an inflectional grammar comparable to that of Latin (a member of the group of Italic languages, which shares the Indo-European roots of Germanic) or, more closely, Old Norse and Old English. The main difference between the inflectional systems of Icelandic and Latin lies in the treatment of the verb. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and other word classes are handled in a similar way. In particular it may be mentioned that Icelandic possesses quite a few instances of oblique cases without any governing word, much like Latin (e.g., many of the various Latin ablatives have a corresponding Icelandic dative).
Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages. It is the closest living relative of Faroese; these two languages, along with Norwegian, comprise the West Scandinavian languages, descended from the western dialects of Old Norse. Danish and Swedish make up the other branch, called the East Scandinavian languages. More recent analysis divides the North Germanic languages into insular Scandinavian and continental Scandinavian languages, grouping Norwegian with Danish and Swedish based on mutual intelligibility and the fact that Norwegian has been heavily influenced by East Scandinavian (particularly Danish) during the last millennium and has diverged considerably from both Faroese and Icelandic.
The vast majority of Icelandic speakers live in Iceland. There are about 8,165 speakers of Icelandic living in Denmark,[3] of whom approximately 800 are students[4]. The language is also spoken by 2,655 people in the USA[1] and by 385 in Canada[2] (mostly in Gimli, Manitoba). 97% of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongue[5], but in communities outside Iceland the usage of the language is declining. Extant Icelandic speakers outside Iceland represent recent emigration in almost all cases except Gimli, which was settled from the 1880s onwards.
