Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

[tastyonions]

In an age of Facebook, YouTube and Netflix, smartphones, voice recognition and digital personal assistants, the language of the Icelandic sagas – written on calfskin between AD1200 and 1300 – is sinking in an ocean of English.

“It’s called ‘digital minoritisation’,” said Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, a professor of Icelandic language and linguistics at the University of Iceland. “When a majority language in the real world becomes a minority language in the digital world.”

Secondary school teachers already report 15-year-olds holding whole playground conversations in English, and much younger children tell language specialists they “know what the word is” for something they are being shown on the flashcard, but not in Icelandic.

Because young Icelanders in particular now spend such a large part of their lives in an almost entirely English digital world, said Eiríkur, they are no longer getting the input they need to build a strong base in the grammar and vocabulary of their native tongue. “We may actually be seeing a generation growing up without a proper mother tongue,” he said.

...

Online, however, is the biggest concern. Apart from Google – which, mainly because it has an Icelandic engineer, has added Icelandic speech recognition to its Android mobile operating system – the internet giants have no interest in offering Icelandic options for a population the size of Cardiff’s.

“For them, it costs the same to digitally support Icelandic as it does to digitally support French,” Eiríkur said. “Apple, Amazon … If they look at their spreadsheets, they’ll never do it. You can’t make a business case.”

...

Icelandic has survived almost unscathed for well over 1,000 years, and few experts worry it will die in the very near future. “It remains the majority, official language of a nation state, of education and government,” Nowenstein said.

“But the concern is that it becomes obsolete in more and more domains, its use restricted, so it’s second best in whole areas of people’s lives. Then you worry about Icelanders understanding much less, for example, of their cultural heritage.”

In the meantime, Naylor said, literacy rates among Icelandic children are falling as their vocabulary shrinks. “You could soon have a situation where Icelanders will be native in neither Icelandic or English,” he said. “When identity is so tied up with language … it’s hard to know what that will mean.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... extinction

[PeterMollenburg]

Sad but not in the least surprising. For cultures placing more and importance on English and less on their own language, to the point they even push their own language out of whole domains/specialties, a similar outlook awaits. How do you think Breton, Gaelic, Aboriginal languages and so on have lost so many speakers? Look at French replacing Flemish in Brussels. Often the native speakers themselves effectively displace their own language for what they perceive to be a more important or useful one (which makes a lot of sense, and I can’t ‘blame’ people for participating in such trends). Unless their government helps them see their own language as worthwhile (Spain with a few for example).

[Josquin]

Great that we could avoid the topic of politics for so long in this thread!

Peter, you're once again confusing two very different phenomena. One is the spread of English in the modern world and the other is globalization and the role of supranational organizations like the EU. Now, you're of course allowed to think what you will about the latter (although your opinion is pretty biased), but it has nothing to do with the former.

For one, Iceland is not a member of the EU, so your argument doesn't work here. Second, the phenomenon described in the article is due to the Internet and international corporations, not supranational organizations. Third, language change and language death is a deplorable phenomenon maybe, but it's inevitable in some regards. Otherwise, we'd still be speaking Proto-Indo-European instead of English, German, French, or whatever. Fourth, it may be a bit romantic and nostalgic to think that in the olden days everything was better, so we must get back to national values, of which the national language could be one. Fifth, the EU is propagating the use of national languages despite its being a supranational organization! Ever heard of the translation chaos in Brussels and Strasbourg? All EU legislation is translated into all official languages, even Maltese and Irish!

All of this is to say language change has little to do with the EU and Europe-friendly politicians. I'm not going to question your political believes, because I think I know them and I disagree with them, but that doesn't mean you might not have a point. However, this is hardly the right place to discuss this in public.

EDIT: I see Peter has edited his post in the meantime. So, you can forget about what I wrote.

[Chung]

In an age of Facebook, YouTube and Netflix, smartphones, voice recognition and digital personal assistants, the language of the Icelandic sagas – written on calfskin between AD1200 and 1300 – is sinking in an ocean of English.

“It’s called ‘digital minoritisation’,” said Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, a professor of Icelandic language and linguistics at the University of Iceland. “When a majority language in the real world becomes a minority language in the digital world.”

Secondary school teachers already report 15-year-olds holding whole playground conversations in English, and much younger children tell language specialists they “know what the word is” for something they are being shown on the flashcard, but not in Icelandic.

Because young Icelanders in particular now spend such a large part of their lives in an almost entirely English digital world, said Eiríkur, they are no longer getting the input they need to build a strong base in the grammar and vocabulary of their native tongue. “We may actually be seeing a generation growing up without a proper mother tongue,” he said.

...

Online, however, is the biggest concern. Apart from Google – which, mainly because it has an Icelandic engineer, has added Icelandic speech recognition to its Android mobile operating system – the internet giants have no interest in offering Icelandic options for a population the size of Cardiff’s.

“For them, it costs the same to digitally support Icelandic as it does to digitally support French,” Eiríkur said. “Apple, Amazon … If they look at their spreadsheets, they’ll never do it. You can’t make a business case.”

...

Icelandic has survived almost unscathed for well over 1,000 years, and few experts worry it will die in the very near future. “It remains the majority, official language of a nation state, of education and government,” Nowenstein said.

“But the concern is that it becomes obsolete in more and more domains, its use restricted, so it’s second best in whole areas of people’s lives. Then you worry about Icelanders understanding much less, for example, of their cultural heritage.”

In the meantime, Naylor said, literacy rates among Icelandic children are falling as their vocabulary shrinks. “You could soon have a situation where Icelanders will be native in neither Icelandic or English,” he said. “When identity is so tied up with language … it’s hard to know what that will mean.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... extinction

(N.B. section in orange by me)

You can't fathom how much I have come to hate this sentiment on conflating identity and language.

[Bluepaint]

Great that we could avoid the topic of politics for so long in this thread!
.....
All of this is to say language change has little to do with the EU and Europe-friendly politicians. I'm not going to question your political believes, because I think I know them and I disagree with them, but that doesn't mean you might not have a point. However, this is hardly the right place to discuss this in public.

EDIT: I see Peter has edited his post in the meantime. So, you can forget about what I wrote.

Josquin, I edited it as it was in breach of our rules regarding political discussions. The first paragraph will even potentially lead to arguments but I'm hoping they can be avoided so left it in. To explain a little better the abrupt editing the user has been warned before for political discussions. We are not here to warn repeatedly.

[Josquin]

Josquin, I edited it as it was in breach of our rules regarding political discussions. The first paragraph will even potentially lead to arguments but I'm hoping they can be avoided so left it in. To explain a little better the abrupt editing the user has been warned before for political discussions. We are not here to warn repeatedly.

Okay, that explains it. Please feel free to edit my post as well, if it is too political or doesn't fit into the topic any more. I don't want to be the reason for this thread to derail, but I hope it won't come that far, as the topic is an interesting one.

[Cainntear]

You can't fathom how much I have come to hate this sentiment on conflating identity and language.

It is kind of true, though. The reason this is an issue [edit: or perhaps "the reason some people don't see this"] is because of the standardisation of language and thus the use of a single language with minimal dialectal variation over multiple identity groups. For me, I don't build my identity around English because there are so many speakers that are so different from me, but for people with a smaller native language, it really can be a component of a shared group identity.

[Chung]

You can't fathom how much I have come to hate this sentiment on conflating identity and language.

It is kind of true, though. The reason this is an issue [edit: or perhaps "the reason some people don't see this"] is because of the standardisation of language and thus the use of a single language with minimal dialectal variation over multiple identity groups. For me, I don't build my identity around English because there are so many speakers that are so different from me, but for people with a smaller native language, it really can be a component of a shared group identity.

I know what you mean when you say that it's kind of true (I'd add that for a lot of people it's true to the point where the equation of (social/ethnic) identity with language is a given even for "big" languages like French or Mandarin). It exists from the relatively benign sentiment that one's belonging to the Saami depends on whether one speaks any Saamic language (or can demonstrate that any ancestors was/is a native speaker of any Saamic language) to the less benign sentiment that an enclave of some speech community needs to (be) reunite(d) with the "motherland" (irredentism).

Like you, I don't build my identity around English either (although there are some who do when you think about those looking for the "right" kind of English to show class consciousness or those native speakers on this side of the pond who want to stand out from others by regularly using certain Britishisms (e.g. rubbish for garbage, flat for apartment or dodgy for sketchy) in an otherwise typical subvariant of American English). However the degree to which I've seen how strongly/violently people can regard others by how they express themselves (never mind the content) to fit some national myth or political statehood project was revealing for me initially as the only thing that even begins to compare in North America is Québec, and for a lot of us that's tame or quite far away anyway. I've got a sense for such tension through studying Hungarian and Slovak (i.e. being at different ends of Magyarization/Hungarianization), BCMS/SC (e.g. breakup of Yugoslavia), Polish (which was on the wrong end of Russianization in the 19th century) and Latvian and Ukrainian (cf. internal (and external) perception nowadays of monoglots of Russian in Latvia and Ukraine respectively, in addition to bouts of Russianization in previous centuries).

What has also long made me ridicule, if not always hate (I admit that hating the idea is pretty damned strong), the equation of language and identity (especially ethnic identity) is how much I've come to agree with the Hungarian statesman, István Széchenyi, in an era of rising nationalism in the 1840s when he stated:

Feleljünk azon egyszerű kérdésre, hogy vajon ha valaki magyarul tud, magyarul beszél, innen következik-e, miképp neki ezért már magyarrá kellett volna átalakulnia?… Nyelvet, nemzeti sajátságot ily felette könnyűszerrel azonban, én legalább úgy hiszem, még csak biztosítani sem lehet, minthogy – és itt különös figyelemért esedezem – a szólás még korántsem érzés; a nyelvnek pergése korántsem dobogása még a szívnek, és ekképp a magyarul beszélő, sőt legékesebb szóló korántsem magyar még.

"Let us answer the simple question of whether it follows that someone who knows and speaks Hungarian has to transform into a Hungarian... Although it is very easy to link language and national character this way, I for one believe that it is not possible to do so, and here I emphasize that speech is no longer a feeling; the twirl of a tongue is not the beat of the heart, and as such a speaker of Hungarian, however eloquent, is not [necessarily] a Hungarian."

This was in response to his more nationalist rival, Lajos Kossuth. Kossuth had proposed that Magyarization could proceed to the extent that the ethnic minorities of the Hungarian Kingdom could maintain their native languages and customs, but were to live in a state where Hungarian would become the administrative and ecclesiastic language (in practice this soon extended to public education and commerce), and recognize that the Hungarian Kingdom was to become the Hungarian nation-state. Although Széchenyi represented the nobility and rural landowners with their laissez-faire capitalism (and so disliked Kossuth's populist slant that pushed for greater direct democracy and protectionist industrialization), Széchenyi's fear was that the proposal with Hungarian at the forefront would sharpen anti-Hungarian sentiment among the lower classes (who formed a substantial portion of the ethnic minorities), thus adding an ethnic edge to potential class strife. The fragmentation of the Hungarian Kingdom after WWI into several ethnically defined nation-states validated Széchenyi's misgivings to a good degree.

[tarvos]

There's a lot of utilitarianism going on here. I can totally understand that because of economies of scale, large-scale support for Icelandic is a little sketchy for most big companies. On the other hand, I want my computer in Icelandic too...

And what I don't like about the article is how they overstate the difficulty of Icelandic.

[Cavesa]

This is nothing new and it has been going on for a long time and lots of languages. There is a link to this study in the article: http://www.meta-net.eu/whitepapers/key- ... comparison

We could write for ages about languages disappearing, reappearing, about the dominance of English, and so on. We already have been. I've just deleted my post to this thread including a lot of that.

There is, however, one very interesting bit of the article: The Iceland's government is aware of the problem and willing to put money into a partial solution. If they make the companies cooperate somehow (which will be very tough), if they put money into it, if they support the native speakers to pursuit the goal of more Icelandic on the internet both through jobs (working for the companies, with perhaps the government paying the people partially or something like that, to make it less bothersome and expensive for the companies to make the Icelandic versions of products), and through free time activities. The Wikipedia is an excellent example of a language's presence on the internet and participation on its creation could be easily implemented in schools, for example.

There are things that can be done but it is a very uneven fight. While I hate to say it, the kids saying "Icelandic is useless" are not exactly wrong, just like many other kids with small native languages. Czech has a much bigger population of natives than Icelandic, better presence on the internet (the study in that link says it), and still many kids share this opinion, even though they are less likely to act on it, as the overall English level in the population and in schools is much worse than it probably is in Iceland. The icelandic kids are too good at it

We will see more and more of this in near future. The small nations will need to pay for improvement of their internet presense. And the EU could help, if it actually started promoting bi or trilingualism as a normal thing (remove geoblocking completely, insist on more than just English being taught, put the real international exams of a certain level in highschools instead of the national ones of sometimes dubious results, support an open market with the culture stuff, do more PR for european movies in various languages, promote books from various languages being translated, and so on). Without these kinds of support, the smaller languages are lost. They won't die out during our lifetimes probably. But they will be marginalized more and more.

And the stance on this issue will be polarizing many societies. The article talks about the old vs. young generation division. But it is not only this. It is the better educated vs. the worse educated, the more successful people vs. the less successful, the conservative values vs. the more liberal ones, and so on. Forcing the younger, better educated, and in future probably more successful people to use their small language instead of improving the one they see as more valuable won't remedy this. They need positive motivation, that is the only way.