Reykjavík Grapevine - 21.04.2017, Blaðsíða 13

rible job of teaching Icelandic to foreign-
ers,” Eiríkur contends. “Not all of the
courses are suited to the learners, and
we should be offering Icelandic classes
during the day, as a part of their jobs.
Many people will come to this country,
get low-paying jobs, and they're stuck
there. We import people to come work
in Iceland, and they don't have the time
to learn Icelandic [on top of working full
time].”
These two combined effects are cre-
ating what Eiríkur calls “a low-salary
society,” wherein Iceland is effectively
divided into two classes: low-wage earn-
ers who don’t speak the language, and a
professional managerial class of people
who do.
But what about English?
Eiríkur also addressed the oft-repeated
fear that English is taking over. While
he acknowledges English is beginning
to dominate aspects of Icelandic society,
he has its doubts that it is causing any
real damage.
“The biggest threat to the Icelandic
language is not English loan words, or
that some people inflect words differ-
ently than before,” he says. “The real
threat is that Icelandic might become
unusable in large areas.”
The large areas in which Icelandic
may become unusable, he cautions, is in
technology. In fact, Eiríkur has spent the
past fifteen years warning that Icelandic
may experience what some linguists
describe as “digital death”: the disap-
pearance of a language from the techno-
logical world.
Your RÚV; Not Ours
Author Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, more
popularly known as Sjón, also believes
technology plays a part in threatening
the Icelandic language. However, Sjón
also takes the position that Iceland’s cul-
tural life is too excluding of foreigners, to
the detriment of Icelandic itself.
“I think the majority of the Icelandic
population is, willfully or not, ignoring
this new part of the population,” Sjón
says. “We have a city theatre, we have
a municipal arts museum, and other
cultural institutions run by the city,
yet I think it's only the library that has
made any effort towards the immigrant
community and really opened the doors
to them. And then there's the national
broadcasters, RÚV. There are no pro-
grammes on RÚV for the immigrant
community.”
At the heart of this, Sjón believes, is a
paradox: on the one hand, Icelandic is a
special and wonderful language; on the
other hand, the government does noth-
ing to preserve it.
“It's been very strange for someone
like myself, who's been involved in Ice-
landic culture for nearly 40 years now, to
experience this paradox,” he says. “We've
had one Cultural Minister after another
who've been completely blind to the real-
ity: up to 13% of the population is from
elsewhere. If these Cultural Ministers
and public figures really care about the
Icelandic language, then they should
really put an effort into doing whatever
this host country of immigrants can do
to open up the language for them.”
Those who teach it
Freyja Auðunsdóttir teaches Icelandic
at Flensborg secondary school in Haf-
narfjörður. Despite all the talk about
how Icelandic is under threat, she re-
mains optimistic. “The technical world
is, more or less, all in English, and that
does present some kind of danger as the
world gets ever smaller,” she says. “But I
still think we can be a bit relaxed about
this, as long as we're using Icelandic.
These two things can exist side by side.
We have rappers, and stand-up comics,
musicians writing their material in Ice-
landic. And that's before we talk about
television and movies in Icelandic, and
there have never been as many books
published in Icelandic as there are now.”
At the same time, Freyja also takes a
decidedly descriptivist approach to why
she believes Icelandic will ultimately
survive. “My students often times will
use Icelandic words that I don't know,”
Freyja tells us. “It could be some form
of slang or loan words, but that is a big
part of language. Language is a living
thing. It's a creature that we can't con-
trol. Some words are born, others fade
away. So when we talk about ‘protecting
the language,’ I don't think that should
mean locking the language up in a mu-
seum and letting it collect dust in a glass
box. I'd actually be more worried if Ice-
landic never changed. We protect Ice-
landic by using Icelandic. That's how it
survives, and we've survived a lot.”
“Language
is a living
thing. It's
a creature
that we
can't con-
trol.”
“13% of the
population is
from elsewhere…
there are no
programmes
on RÚV for the
immigrant
community.”
Sjón
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