Icelandic · Íslenska

About Icelandic

Language family

Indo-European, North Germanic (Insular Scandinavian)

Where it's spoken

Iceland

Speakers

roughly 350,000–370,000 speakers

Icelandic is famously conservative: because of the island's isolation, it has changed so little grammatically since Norse settlement in the 9th and 10th centuries that modern speakers can still read the medieval sagas largely without translation. Its closest relative is Faroese, spoken on the Faroe Islands, with more distant ties to mainland Scandinavian languages. Rather than borrowing foreign words for new concepts, Icelandic has a strong tradition of coining new terms from native roots, overseen by an official language committee.