Icelandic language.

   It may be surprising ,but the little island in the northern Atlantic called Iceland ,has a seperate language. This language is not widely spoken. About 350,000 people speak it. This makes it a very rare language. This language is in the germanic branch of languages, and inside it is a scandinavian language. The seperation of the island makes this language unique. It was seperated from the events of Europe, so very little foreign words were built in the language and it stayed so unchanged, that icelandic speakers can read 1000 year old texts without much problem. Even the special characters survived like þ, ð, æ, ý. But the letter Z died out from the language.
 
   Language purity movements happened in Iceland in the 18th and 19th century. This was for the reasons to get rid of the foreign words from the language and to renew it. This was quite successful as far as I have seen. Most of the words differ from other relatives. Words like tölva (computer), rafmagn (electricity), sími (telephone) make great example. But it has a lot of similarities. For example: hár (hair), bók (book),  það (that).

   I started to learn this magnificent language, but it's really hard. The grammar is like german, but I think it is more logical. For example you can guess out the gender from the end of the word.  The weird thing is that they use the personal pronouns differently. There are different words for the english word "they". This can be þeir (for males), þær (for females) and þau (for neutral or females-males mixed). And they use the he ,she ,it for object too. If you refer to lamp in a sentence then it is like this: Hann er ... (so they use he to refer to the object).

   But for me the hardness of this language comes from the lack of books and dictionaries. It's really hard to find a useable one. So I cannot know for sure what a word means. But except for this little problem this is my 2nd favourite language after hungarian. The pronunciaton for me is beautiful and hard. The letter "r" plays a bigger role in the speech. This gives extra life to sentences. The only problem I have with the pronunciation is the double L. It's really hard to pronounce and build it in a sentence. But I feel like this language should be more recognised and widely known.

Dani