If you’re a linguist or just love languages check out this section of our blog where we post interesting stuff about languages and culture.
Here are some quick facts about the Icelandic language origin and history. Currently 350,000 people speak Icelandic in the world. Of these, 323,000 people live in Iceland. As the world’s population currently stands at 7 billion people, it means that 0.005% speak Icelandic. This is a fact which is important for linguists who are more interested in the history of Iceland and its native language.
Recently there has been a discussion going among our in-house translators whether or not English is a Scandinavian language. So let’s try and find out here.
The Norwegian language or Norse – Norsk originated in the North group of languages. It is the official main language spoken in Norway, but mutually comprehensible and easy to use for the Swedish and Danish people. Suffice it to say, knowledge of only one of these three languages is enough to understand any of them with their local and regional variants, at a basic level.
Dying languages are unfortunately quite common in a globalized world, and today we’re going to see if the Icelandic language is going to be used in the future or it’s something we should just leave behind.
Countries in the northern part of Europe are used to be called Nordic—meaning northern. Being more than just a geographical region as it is a cultural unit, the Nordic countries seem to share similar values and societal structures that define similar language patterns and customs as well.
Learning a language can be a daunting task for the inexperienced linguist, but patience and hard work will get you there. There could be quite some challenges if you want to learn Norwegian, but while it won’t be easy, it’s not impossible either, and here are some tips to help you.
Swedish is part of East Scandinavian languages, which in turn represents a part of the North Germanic subdivision of the Germanic languages. It has its origins in the Old Norse. There are numerous linguistic similarities with Norwegian and Danish, which allows for basic interchange.
‘Finnish’ is a part of the Finno-Ugric family. Almost 6 million individuals who reside mostly in Russia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, and Canada speak the ‘Sumoi’ language. Sumoi and Swedish hold the position of the official languages of Finland since 1892. Here is an overview from a professional translation service regarding Finnish language translation and history.
Danish is part of the Scandinavian languages, and the other languages of this group are Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic. Nearly six million individuals in Denmark, Faroe Islands, Greenland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden use the Danish language for communication. In addition to this, Danish is an official language of the EU and one of the popular dialects of the Nordic Council.
In today’s European Union countries, bearing in mind the large language diversity in schools, there is a need to analyse different aspects of the second language being taught to these pupils. The teaching of a foreign language is mostly influenced by demand, by the level of teacher qualification, by whether the teaching resources are sufficient, by the strength of motivation that is implemented and by exposure to foreign languages.
