Foreign Language Learning
Linguistic purification does not imply limitations or neglect for foreign language learning. Teaching of foreign languages in Iceland is heavily emphasized, and the learning of English and Danish (or another Scandinavian language) in school is compulsory. Danish was taught as Iceland was a dominion of Denmark until 1918 (sharing the king until 1944); studying is still compulsory to maintain ties with Scandinavia. English is learned as the main international language, especially due to the internationalization of the economy of Iceland with the intensive trade and capital flows to and from the outside world. Entering a gymnasium students are also usually required to choose a third foreign language. Traditionally that was either German or French, but in recent years Spanish has also been offered, at least in some gymnasia. Other languages are sometimes added as an option but then usually in the context of choosing a language-heavy study at the cost of an education in the natural sciences. Students in elementary schools who have lived in other Nordic countries or for whatever reason have an understanding at some level of other Scandinavian languages are sometimes offered to continue their study of other Scandinavian languages instead of Danish.
Read more about this topic: Linguistic Purism In Icelandic
Famous quotes containing the words foreign, language and/or learning:
“Was I not born in this Realm? Were my parents born in any foreign country?... Is not my Kingdom here? Whom have I oppressed? Whom have I enriched to other’s harm? What turmoil have I made to this Commonwealth that I should be suspected to have no regard of the same?”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“The child amidst his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)