Icelandic language | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2018-12-03

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Icelandic language


00:02:53 1 History
00:05:08 2 Legal status and recognition
00:06:29 3 Phonology
00:07:22 3.1 Consonants
00:08:36 3.2 Vowels
00:08:44 4 Grammar
00:13:31 5 Vocabulary
00:14:45 5.1 Linguistic purism
00:15:47 6 Writing system
00:16:48 7 Cognates with English
00:17:24 8 See also



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SUMMARY
=======
Icelandic ( (listen); Icelandic: íslenska pronounced [ˈiːs(t)lɛnska] (listen)) is a North Germanic language spoken in Iceland. Along with Faroese, Norn, and Western Norwegian it formerly constituted West Nordic; while Danish, Eastern Norwegian and Swedish constituted East Nordic. Modern Norwegian Bokmål is influenced by both groups, leading the Nordic languages to be divided into mainland Scandinavian languages and Insular Nordic (including Icelandic). Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages until the Portuguese settlement in the Azores. 
Most Western European languages have greatly reduced levels of inflection, particularly noun declension. In contrast, Icelandic retains a four-case synthetic grammar comparable to German, though considerably more conservative and synthetic. Icelandic is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Icelandic also has many instances of oblique cases without any governing word, much like Latin. For example, many of the various Latin ablatives have a corresponding Icelandic dative. The conservatism of the Icelandic language and its resultant near-isomorphism to Old Norse (which is equivalently termed Old Icelandic by linguists) means that modern Icelanders can easily read the Eddas, sagas, and other classic Old Norse literary works created in the tenth through thirteenth centuries.
Icelandic is closely related to, but not mutually intelligible with the Faroese language, and is also not mutually intelligible with the continental Scandinavian languages. It is also farther away from the largest Germanic languages English and German than those three are.
The vast majority of Icelandic speakers—about 320,000—live in Iceland. More than 8,000 Icelandic speakers live in Denmark, of whom approximately 3,000 are students. The language is also spoken by some 5,000 people in the United States and by more than 1,400 people in Canada, notably in the province of Manitoba. While 97% of the population of Iceland consider Icelandic their mother tongue, the language is in decline in some communities outside Iceland, particularly in Canada. Icelandic speakers abroad represent recent emigration in almost all cases except Gimli, Manitoba, which was settled from the 1880s onwards.
The state-funded Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies serves as a centre for preserving the medieval Icelandic manuscripts and studying the language and its literature. The Icelandic Language Council, comprising representatives of universities, the arts, journalists, teachers, and the Ministry of Culture, Science and Education, advises the authorities on language policy. Since 1995, on 16 November each year, the birthday of 19th-century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson is celebrated as Icelandic Language Day.