Linguistic Purism in Icelandic - Creation of New Words

Creation of New Words

Organisations and individuals in many specialist areas together with the Icelandic Language Institute propose and use new technical lexis, which diversifies the Icelandic lexicon as a whole. When trying to introduce words for new or modern concepts, it is common to revitalise old words that have fallen into disuse that have a similar meaning or are in the same semantic field. For example, the word sími, an old word for ‘long thread’, was brought back with a new meaning—‘telephone’. Alternatively, new compound words such as veðurfræði (‘meteorology’) can be formed from old words (in this case veður ‘weather’, and fræði ‘science’). Because of this, it is easy for speakers of Icelandic to deconstruct many words to find their etymologies; indeed compound words are very frequent in the Icelandic language. This system also makes it easier for new words to fit in with existing Icelandic grammatical rules: the gender and declensions of the compound word can easily be extracted from its derivatives, as can pronunciations. In recent years, the government has promoted an interest in technology and efforts to produce Icelandic language software and other computer interfaces have also taken place.