YESSS!!!!

And add more levels to Pimsleur as well

I am still waiting and hoping for it

Try Drops as well , it in the top 25

It’s just taking some damn long to add the language to Duolingo, which I find absolutely ridiculous! Especially being of part Icelandic heritage and a person who has a bit of obsession with Iceland.

Klárlega, vandamálið er að það er skortur á fólki til að vinna þau störf. Þessvegna þarf að flytja fólk inn til að vinna þau.

It's encouraging to hear you say that about speaking Icelandic in 'real life'. What you said about shops rings true! A friend of mine, who is a keen linguist, tried hard to learn some Icelandic for a trip there last year. He asked for something in a café and the waitress said, "sorry, I don't speak Icelandic". That must be infuriating for locals!

@@blotski its rely anyoing parten my english but its sadly very true as more pepole come to iceland for work most of them are to lazy to learn our languge and i asked some of the pepole and they say that they dont cear honestly that is the core problem pepole dont cear about our langue becuse its so small and i think the iclandic popelation is not harsh enugh to the pepole to talk iclandic including me i think it shuld be mandatory

@@orix3434 yes, it should be mandatory to speak YOUR language in YOUR country!

Einmitt!

thanks it means a lot to us

I could always melt to hear my ex talking Icelandic to his family but he never talked Icelandic to me despite he knew I was learning. He found talking in English easier because he spend most his time abroad... Gosh I miss it, Icelandic sounds so beautiful like a magic language. I hope for happier days.

@@AnnaMaria-zm8cv Go back with Him then.

thank you, my accent is magical.

@@psycorea7322 lol🦄

@@87g4g3 Indeed so.

How bad is the situation there, is your language dying like my language (Irish)

Filipino (although an amalgamated language by design, with Tagalog lending most of its words) is also plagued by loanwords. :/ One Icelandic word I learnt when I went to island is Ejyafjallajökull :)

@@TheLoughDuck55 No - not dying but under attack. Just today they announced no more children's dvd's published with captions ... so that's a battle lost right there. But we will survive. One thing we do not do is to adapt "foreign" words into our vocabulary. We make new ones or use very old ones that may have been "discontinued". For example "jet", "television", "telephone" and "computer" all have organic Icelandic names.

@@howser1961 do people actually use those native coined terms, or do they just use the English ones anyway?

Vel gert.

Hvernig gengur?

chinese language have though

Hungarian has that kind of policy too

Ahh I see. They must Integrate then.

English below. Ég er íslenskur og það sem vantar hjá Íslendingum þegar við tölum við útlendinga sem eru að læra íslensku er þolinmæði. Enginn virðist hafa tíma fyrir bjagaða íslensku eða vandræðaleg og höktandi samtöl þó að til langs tíma skilar það sér í að fleiri læri tungumálið og aðlagist samfélaginu. Við verðum að hætta að skipta af fyrra bragði yfir á ensku nema einstaklingurinn sjáfur biðji um það. Það vantar bæði hvata og fjármagn frá hinu opinbera til að styðja við íslenskukennlu en almenningur á örugglega stærstan hlut í að hafa áhrif á viðhorf útlendinga til tungumálsins. Ef við, sjálfir Íslendingarnir erum með minnimáttarkennd gagnvart tungumálinu og álítum það bara vera ves þá auðvitað litar það hvernig þau sjá tungumálið á einhvern hátt. Þessi máltæknihópur og ríkisstjórnin sem hafa hrundið þessu verkefni af stað til að tryggja að íslenskan verði aðgengileg og gjaldgeng í framtíðinni eiga stórt hrós skilið 🥰🇮🇸 I am an Icelander and what I think we need most of all when speaking to foreigners who are learning icelandic is patience. Nobody seems have the time to listen to a little distorted, hectic or in times awkward speech from beginners even though in the long run that is what brings more people to learn the language and feel like they truly belong in the icelandic society. We must stop switching right away to english when speaking to a learner unless the person specifically asks for that. What's lacking is incentives and funding from the authorities to support the icelandic courses for foreigners. Icelander's mindset towards Icelandic language probably has the biggest affect on how foreigners view the language. If we look at our own language as a hastle and feel a kind of "little man syndrome" due to the small number of speakers then of course that's going to affect the foreigners view of the language in one way or the other. The government and the languagetech group deserve the best praise and compliments for initiating this project to ensure that our language has it's place in the digital world of the future and is accessible for all.

May we ask why have you decided to learn Icelandic?

Quartz I have time to kill

@@narayana8249 we love an honest man

Bónus

fun fact: the biggest grocery store chain in Iceland is named Bónus, that means bonus

Portuguese? Why?

Etymologically, glugga is related to google, to look / stare, and vethur (weather) reveals a bit about how close English & Islandic (Isensk) are in much of our vocabularies. (I cannot say the same for our grammars though.;-) )

@@you2tooyou2too I think you mean 'goggle'. Google is a misspelling of googol which is the number 10 to the power of 100 (1 followed by 100 zeros).

If there is one thing that i have learned it is that if the government is involved, you SHOULD worry.

@@wasweiich9991 I don't necessarily like the government. But they mandate that Icelandic is the official language used by them. Kindergarten teachers only speak Icelandic and Icelandic is the only language taught from 1st grade and all the way through high school. The Icelandic language is therefore protected as the primary language, the native language and official language of the country. NOT English.

@@BigBen444 Sadly that is not how it works. You can mandate all kinds of things, if they do not ensure the USE of the language, it WILL die. Then you have the irish situation or the welsh one. The language can be seen everywhere and bla, but hardly anyone ever actually uses it in reality. So all this means absolutely nothing, if they for example do not control the influx of immigrants that can not speak the language. In germany we have Kindergardens speaking low german, so the language does not vanish. Though tehy do not use it at all afetr tehy get out of it. Thus: Completely useless in the end. You need a strong community actually speaking and using it DAILY in every part of life. Otehrwise it will die a slow but sure death. That is a linguistic fact, no matter how many schools you put up.

@@wasweiich9991 sorry, but that's not the situation here in Iceland. We weren't as crazy as you by taking a shitload of immigrants. Icelandic is used by the old and the young in daily life. It is used on the streets, at home, in stores, on TV, in school etc. We have some number of polish people but most of them have learned Icelandic and use it too. There are couple of nerdy uncool and unpopular teens who speak English but those people are frowned upon. NO ONE, except those nerds, speaks English in daily life. Icelandic is SAFE. Believe me. I live here, I participate in society here, not you. I know what I am talking about.

LMAO TRUE

That's SAD!!

True, yet we see Svalbard (Svalbarði) which is much smaller than Iceland. Ireland isn't there either and Iceland is larger than Ireland...

Yeah its rather difficult due to how we pronounce most of our words like we dont use the simple english but we use letters like, É Á Ó Ú Í Æ Ö Ý and none of these letters sound the same and its rather annoying

@Steve Prince basicly best way too learn a language is not by books but rather live in that place and let the natives teach you

@Steve Prince yup i agree with that but icelanders can be a bit of a racist bigots that are more stubborn than a spoiled kid who is a flatearther

@Steve Prince yebb true. But it gets kinda annoying but its something we just live with

Myself and many language enthusiasts petitioned Assimil and Pimsleur to release a program, since 2008. Pimsleur released one in 2016 and Assimil released their program for French speakers in 2018. The many Icelandic Associations in North America, I contacted to request specifically Pimsleur from the Public Library, which they will bring in, if there are enough requests. In other words no cost to the people requesting, since it is the public library. Suffice it to say, the Icelandic organisations, especially the ones in Canada pretty much stated they don't care. If they were unwilling to even request a program behind a computer screen, there is no way in hell, they would even borrow the material, much less actually use the program to completion.

Celtic Revival / Adfywiad Celtaidd wtf, why r u so triggered, I’m just saying that the Icelandic accent sounds so welsh

It's true, they're both very light sing song accents

The accent is weird. I've gotten guesses ranging from India to Scotland

ಠ_ಠ yo i live in west Norway, but i come from Iceland! What a weird coincidence

oj

This is pretty much my situation to a tee, i have desperately wanted to speak better icelandic since i was very young. But because it is so difficult to access any material i find myself always speaking in a bastardized version which is more english than icelandic. Thank you

A fair question, but the answer supports our video thesis - we don't offer digital Icelandic content.

@@Qznews we could add it ourselves if you enable community subtitles!

Quartz community subtitles?

For spreading it outside of Iceland, maybe. For maintaining it within the country, not exactly

Absolute Zero absolutely. I think it might be in the process though. All their langs are made by volunteers so it’s a little slow

@The King lol, I wanna learn since it’s so difficult

Don't give up. Keep doing it.

Good luck with your linguistic pursuits!

They have a voiceless dental fricative

Im gonna tell you this. Icelandic language is rather difficult and there are so many words that just sound the same and mean different things like hvítur mávur and kviðmágur one is a bird and the latter is a person who have had sex with the same person as someone else and the makes the two guys a kviðmagar

Do you believe that technology can make languages spoken by smaller groups less relevant?

@@Qznews No, english, the dominant language in this case, fills a space not previously occupied. It acts as a common tongue for people from different parts of the world online. Its the only reason we are all able to communicate. The cultural exchange taking place will shape all our languages, including english. That doesnt mean smaller languages will die out. Its a good thing Iceland takes measures to make technology accesible for people who cant speak english, but being snobbish towards loan words doesnt help anyone. Its also not fair to compare the language of a sovereign state to 3500 languages with no protected status and/or enough native speakers to sustain themselves. (Dont know if this was your intention, but still.) Those languages would still be at risk of dying out even if the internet didn't exist. In fact, the internet is the best chance those languages have at preserving themselves for future generations. Icelandic will remain the dominant language in Icelandic society, because social life, schools, the government... everything is build around it. You cant squash that because a fridge refuses to speak Icelandic to you. I used the internet as stand-in for "new technology" but its kind of the same as f.e. a talking fridge or siri. Only the input methode (talking vs writing) has changed.

"Hollywood doesn't like to make movies in foreign languages" Maybe because Hollywood is American?! If u want Icelandic movies tell Iceland to make them not America.

Its because Hollywood has another agenda, they only produce brainwash propaganda junk and doing that in English serves the most people. Iceland by the way, produces some quality series and movies themselves, some are on Netflix. But if you live in Iceland you cannot watch them as Netflix doesnt have the rights (I just had to say) to stream those in Iceland.

Góðan daginn fjarskyldi frændi/frænka.

@@psycorea7322 góðan daginn

Nei, falskar fréttir.

Nei komdu sæll og blessaður. Þetta myndband var frekar áhugavert. Hverjir hérna lærðu ensku i gegnum teiknimyndir úr æsku t,d cartoon networks ?

Hallö

Good point. Especially the second one. I speculate that it could be a thinning of the youth's sense of national identity. Why that is the case, I do not know; but I'm curious.

I think the issue is value proposition. How much value does knowing one of these smaller languages bring? If it's for a job then minimal. if it's for future prospects, living elsewhere or using the digital medium then there is still increasingly less value in knowing these languages. There is still a lot of value in digitizing all the information about the languages but not much in actually speaking or understanding it on a personal level unless you devote yourself to them. Like lets say someone in iceland learns english and plans to move to the UK to get a job as a surgeon. How often would they need to speak Icelandic there? With borders increasingly becoming open to move across broad use languages become valuable. Unless we can get more instantaneous free flowing language translation we won't really have much value for the small languages.

@@chadnoneo9769, I'm still not sure I buy it. You don't decide to speak or reject your own native language in your native country in everyday life based on job prospects. It might make sense to do that when deciding which foreign languages to learn (putting aside for a moment that there are many reasons to learn a language that don't include "corporate usefulness"), but not your own language. My native language is English. I cannot imagine ever not using it, wanting to speak it, or even speaking it by natural instinct (whether chosen consciously or not), anywhere in the world. If I became a hermit in a foreign tribe with no outside contact, I would speak English to my children, simply because anything else would feel strange, perverse, and abnormal to me. And I say this as someone who speaks more than one language.

@@chadnoneo9769 Hmm, agreed - if the discussion is about linguistic value outside of the border. I'm thinking there is a cultural disconnect between the younger and older generations. Due, perhaps, from lack of communication. If that happens - and happens in mass - the youth could turn to the Internet for connection. And, since the language of the Internet is predominantly English, it will take up more of their cultural attainment and use.

L Georgiou do you speak any other languages? Fluently.

Hörkudugleg manneskja :D

What if they suggested that to your language? Would you be willing to sacrifice your mother tongue? Icelandic is the most beautiful of them, followed by Norwegian, then Swedish and Danish last. They should all be on their own. By the way, Faroese is almost like that idea, Icelandic with a Danish slang.

@@AnnaMaria-zm8cv It was just an idea to try to prevent future generations from adopting more and more English in their daily lives. I speak Portuguese. I would find it interesting to learn a modern version of Latin if all the Neolatin-speaking countries reached an agreement. Books would be even cheaper and diplomacy and trade would benefit. But it's just an idea ... don't take me seriously. Take good care of your language.

Try Icelandic Online. Free courses which can bring you up to a decent level. For talking and conversation they offer payed courses as well.

@@AnnaMaria-zm8cv I can recommend that website too.

Interesting point, Irish is an interesting example of a language that could use help in an increasingly digital world.

I think he pointed out that is there lots of documented knowledge in these languages that haven't been translated. Which I think is important to preserving these languages in order to translate this unfound knowledge.

lol, exactly. Being able to use your smart device (phone, laptop, refrigerator) in your national language is one thing. But there really doesn't need to be a committee that fabricates words like 'tjámerki' for emoji. Hell, the word "emoji" is of Japanese origin and largely replaced the word "emoticon" and no one in the world seems to care. If Icelandic is dying, then native Icelandic words are being *replaced* by foreign ones. But according to this video, it seems that foreign words are simply being introduced to describe foreign concepts. This has been going on in most of Europe for millennia.

Because the French government would rather French be the only language spoken in the country.

on the contrary, the French government has put a lot of effort into driving Breton off the cliff for good...

aldrei??

@Danilo K Not true at all.

Surely they should speak icelandic

@Danilo K every language is unique in its lexicon, syntax, phonology, etc. that doesn't make English inexpressible or dull in the least... quite on the contrary - English has a very particular, interesting, diverse and encompassing history. Furthermore, the quality of the literature in English from the Anglo-Saxon, Medieval and Elizabethan periods was always unparalleled - much before English took off to be spoken anywhere outside the British Isles.

I experienced the same, with French people, they seriously expect me to understand them, they just talk and talk and are pissed off nobody talks French.... But if you say asshole they do understand.... (Not that I said that lol). Well hey I had French in school but I couldnt keep all subjects so French was first to be dropped. Au revoir. No wonder those people end up off road or in dangerous situations, along with the Russians.... cant read signs and warnings. It improved when they finally implemented French and Chinese in the warnings. Then covid came and we no longer have tourists go wrong.

Prince Risen I did too 😂😂

The point is, they need an Icelandic word to describe what mansplaining is - only then can they use their own native language to discuss about whether mansplaining is a real thing or a pile of crap.

@@AsphaltAntelope Yes I understood that.

What's surprising about it?

@@sergiopena8121 To me the idea of mansplaining is pure hogwash. Its not real, and its only an excuse to insult the other gender. Talk about sexism am I right?

@@Nitrodino7875 well i'm not easily offended so I tend to accept the definition given by the people who use it instead of trying to reason out my own definition like a NERD

A single borough of London, Quartier of Paris and city block of f NYC has more people than Iceland, come on they're 300k people, not 120M

@@Azknowledgethirsty that only makes the employment of such strict policies easier. The population is much more homogeneous and culturally uniform - start by forbidding almost all foreign loanwords in written form, replacing them with the terms that body is working on. it'll take time but there are historical examples of success. Create programs in-school and across the society to cultivate the native language, revive arcane words, expressions. And, of course, have the tech devices USE the language otherwise there's no turning back.

If you live in Iceland, you notice many (government) sites are Icelandic only. It slowly changes but still, its usually only the Polish alternative they offer because thats a big group in the population and many of them dont talk English. Im glad Im confident enough to understand most of it. This year they finally made a guide to do tax return in English. The form itself, of course in Icelandic.

That's an interesting comparison. Thank you for sharing.

Thank you for sharing @Grímur Ingi Einarsson. Interesting that the language is not just suffering from internet platforms and apps - but also just access to entertainment and tv programming.

From my personal experience I'd say that "sletta" is common with people who are bilingual. I am fluent in Spanish and English and, when speaking to others who inderstand both languages, especially in a casual setting, I sometimes use a word in the other language. I try not to do it, but sometimes it just happens. I don't think is a bad thing, but if it becomes too pervasive, it could put the language at risk, especially a language with such a small amount of speakers.

likira111 We speak Icelandic on a day to day basis (most of us) but the younger generation has a considderably worse vocabulary than older generations whem they were our age. Many Generation Z Icelanders even go so far as to speak only English with their friends. That including me, at one point but I just decided to stop.

If there was only one race there would not be racism. Horrible, we agree right? That's how you sound to me.

@@inigomeniego4906 no, because race is a natural thing that exists in nature, language by contrast its a tool, when it no longer serves its purpose you can throw it away Maybe a solution would be for everyone to know their mother tonge plus English (like me !) , one of the simplest languages that exist

Jesse Yeah but.. that’s boring as hell

@@narayana8249 nobody said it was interesting, just Efficient and Rational That's why advocate for billingualism

Fine, but which one do we choose??

Alas, this is true @Dai George we do not have the capacity for Icelandic captioning.

Robot Enthusiast i dont think we will homogenise, rather, it would be around a balers dozen. Which still terrifies me

Oooh what does that translate to in english?!

Vaðlaheiðar­vega­vinnu­verk­færa­geymslu­skúr­slyklakippu­hring­ur­inn, here is one in Icelandic. What does your word mean?

Since when? Just in your dreams

Lol

flestum finnst það erfitt, ertu norsk eða dönsk?

Saga Omars èg er pólsku ☺️

@@silverwindss596 geggjað!!! takk fyrir að læra íslensku 😁