The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Page 24

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #1
Ingrid, the present Queen of Denmark, not
only bears an Icelandic middle name but is
a friend of the Icelanders. For them Her
Majesty’s divine origin is beyond dispute.
I realize of course that the term bilin-
gualism is quite an inappropriate designa-
tion of the way in which Icelanders in past
centuries used Latin and their native lan-
guage to communicate or even reciprocate
with other nations in the cultural arena. On
a lighter note I must however add that dis-
tinguished foreign visitors to Iceland in the
19th century praised the high quality of
education in that country, where good
command of Latin, they maintained, was
not only achieved by members of the cler-
gy and public officials but was quite com-
mon among ordinary people. In Iceland the
common man knew that his pastor was flu-
ent in Latin and learned the language from
him. This kind of private tutoring is hinted
at in the published works of Lord Dufferin
of England and Professor Willard Fiske of
Cornell University who, respectively, visit-
ed Iceland in 1856 and 1879 and wrote
about their experiences there. In their day,
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these two gentlemen took a strong liking to
peoples living on the periphery of civiliza-
tion in geographically remote areas. The
culture and mode of living they discovered
in such out-of-the-way parts of the world
impressed them, so they tended to elevate
what they found there to the plane of leg-
end or myth, a level where bilingualism in
Iceland most likely belongs.
Iceland was under Denmark for more
than six centuries. During that period, all
matters of administration and trade were in
the hands of the Danes. In business and
government the Danish language predomi-
nated. So much has been said and written
about courruptive influences of Danish on
the Icelandic language that even a summary
of all that criticism would be too long for
my presentation. Allow me only to suggest
that voluminous publications in Icelandic
from earlier times with references to gov-
ernment announcements or edicts, loosely
translated from Danish into Icelandic, do
not yield reliable information about the
general language status in Iceland at the
time of their issue. These documents often
contain a peculiar and almost unintelligible
mixture of the two languages, and can only
be seen as a Danish garb of coercive and
oppressive officialese, the kind of jargon
used in government offices, which must
have been difficult for the public to under-
stand, something they would hardly pay
any attention to or accept anyway.
Numerous collections of Icelandic
folktales are supposed to be informative
sources about the condition of Icelandic
spoken by people in general in all the dif-
ferent areas of the country for centuries.
Thus it is believed that in some way these
literary documents give an overall picture
of the abilties of ordinary Icelanders to
express themselves in their mother tongue.
The straightforward narrative style of the
folktales shows no signs of decay or cor-
ruptive influences from a foreign language,
and here I am of course making the naive
assumption that a loan from a host lan-
guage always works to the detriment of the
borrower. With this and many other things
in mind, we can conclude that, despite the
strong political and cultural ties between
Iceland and Denmark which lasted for