L’islandese rischia di estinguersi a causa dell’intelligenza artificiale e dei media in lingua inglese, afferma l’ex primo ministro | Katrín Jakobsdóttir e la sua coautrice vogliono che le 350.000 persone che parlano la lingua combattano per il suo futuro
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/15/icelandic-is-in-danger-of-dying-out-because-of-ai-and-english-language-media-says-former-pm
di GirasoleDE
14 commenti
I hope they find the right path to preserve and grow their language. Language is an important part of a country’s culture, and if we don’t protect our unique differences, we’ll end up being much poorer for it.
You need to understand that US dominate Latin America through coups, Africa/Middle East with violence, Asia through economics and Europe by a blend of cultural with military dependence.
Several languages and cultural traits are dying to be replaced by English and American traits. Asia is getting free of American dominance. The rest should follow.
US is the enemy.
Several languages die every year. Far more than you’d imagine. These people are speedbumps to the inevitable fall to English.
I don’t necessarily consider it a positive thing, just a reality of what international language is trending towards. One hundred years from now, it’ll be an article in their history class tablets… in English.
You cant force a language to stay alive but you can document the hell out of it to make sure that it wont get lost.
capitalism has decided that there has to be one company that owns everything, one language, one country and one god emperor. Anything else is against the natural order of things.
It’s fine… outside influences don’t suppress a language until it is nearly extinct.
Hi from Ireland.
Not everything needs to be preserved.
“What disappears makes room for what has not yet appeared.”
I hope that next Eurovision songs will be in Icelandic.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, English influence is killing languages.
I hope she can find a way to increase Icelandic usage, since it is such a beautiful language that brings great diversity to our continent.
I’d thought 350k people would be a small part, but their total population is 389k, so literally only babies don’t speak it. What’s the issue?
So long as people keep talking to their kids in Icelandic, the language won’t go extinct. Even if people read or listen to a lot of English media, they usually keep speaking in their native language to their relatives. So long as that remains, the Icelandic language should be safe.
Of course Icelandic might change due to anglicisms sneaking in, but languages will change all the time. It’s not a matter of if but rather in which direction.
Island has a small population.
If island should get some huge immigration wave then the language very fastly could become a minority language.
But as long as imigration to island is relatively small to its population, I have a hard time imagining any danger to the language.
i expect AI can be both a threat and an opportunity.
when i visited the faroe islands, whose local language is closely related to icelandic and is spoken by even fewer people, i couldn’t get mainstream translation apps to help me read signs or translate conversation.
but AI could. that felt pretty wild. i asked for the translation mechanics being used and it said it was making inferences based on icelandic text it had already ingested and then adjusted for faroese patterns.
so if AI is not already usable and valuable in icelandic, i assume that is simply a matter of time.
the above post translates by AI:
Ég geri ráð fyrir að gervigreind geti verið bæði ógn og tækifæri.
Þegar ég heimsótti Færeyjar, þar sem staðbundið tungumál er náskylt íslensku og talað af enn færri, gátu hefðbundin þýðingarforrit ekki hjálpað mér að lesa skilti eða þýða samræður.
En gervigreind gat það. Það var ansi sérstök upplifun. Ég spurði hvaða þýðingaraðferð væri notuð og svarið var að hún byggði á ályktunum úr íslenskum texta sem hún hafði þegar fengið, og síðan aðlagaði þær að færeyskum mynstrum.
Ef gervigreind er ekki nú þegar gagnleg og nothæf á íslensku, geri ég ráð fyrir að það sé bara spurning um tíma.
Having visited Iceland a few times over the last 20 years, I really don’t think so. As long as you’re using Icelandic to talk to each other – which you very much are, it’s not going anywhere.
I really don’t think Icelandic or other small languages of modern independent countries are going to be wiped out by just natural osmosis. It’s not comparable to the situations that many languages faced in the past, where they were it was a often a lot more than natural fading, but in many cases they were deliberately oppressed by large hegemonic powers that saw them as political challenges to be overcome to consolidate control and power – there’s a very different view of language these days, and unless the world suddenly flips back to a time of empires and colonialism, I really don’t think we are likely to see smaller countries’ languages just naturally vanish.
Icelandic and many others will likely just continue to coexist with English (and several other big languages) used in business / online / media. That’s just inevitable because there’s a need to communicate internationally.
You can’t really just stop natural evolution of language, and it will change and ebb and flow, but I really don’t think we exist in a European context at least, where languages are being actively pushed out of existence anymore – if anything quite the opposite is true, and smaller languages are recognised as cultural repositories.