Iceland: A language that Siri won’t learn

last updated 8 January 2015

Ingibjörg Rósa Björnsdóttir

The Reykjavík Grapevine

The digital age is killing the Icelandic language, said Ingibjörg Rósa Björnsdóttir. Alas, it simply isn’t cost-effective for any company to create IT interfaces in Icelandic, a language spoken by just 300,000 people. For now, we can access Web and mobile versions of Icelandic news sites. Certain free translation services, such as Google, display other sites in Icelandic, although the machine translation isn’t perfect and Google can choose to cancel this option whenever it wants. But as voice command interfaces become the norm, we’ll be forced to switch to English in our online lives. For the Chinese, or even the Germans or Italians, it makes sense to provide voice interface in their native tongue. Icelanders, though, will “never be able to adjust all the databases or software” that originate in other languages. Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, a professor of Icelandic grammar, has warned that it will take an effort of will on the part of our whole country to preserve our language. We already learn English in school, and most of our rock bands sing in English. It will be all too easy, Rögnvaldsson says, to give up on our mother tongue, assuming that English will make us “competitive in a modern world.” Without government intervention, by the end of the century Icelandic “could be extinct.”