Language
See also: Icelandic language and Linguistic purism in IcelandicThe principal language of Iceland is Icelandic, a highly inflected North Germanic language. Danish and English are also taught in schools. Linguistic purism is strongly supported in Iceland in an attempt to prevent loanwords from entering the language. Instead, neologisms are coined from Icelandic roots, creating a compound word to describe new concepts. It is often the case that old words which are no longer used are recycled with a new meaning. It should be noted, however, that some loanwords persist in Icelandic, and many more, the majority anglicisms, are used in everyday speech.
Read more about this topic: Icelandic Culture
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“We find that the child who does not yet have language at his command, the child under two and a half, will be able to cooperate with our education if we go easy on the “blocking” techniques, the outright prohibitions, the “no’s” and go heavy on “substitution” techniques, that is, the redirection or certain impulses and the offering of substitute satisfactions.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.”
—Dennis Altman (b. 1943)
“The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is “only words” and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)