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How Do You Say "Purism" in Icelandic?
A lot of languages, or more accurately, a lot of speakers or organizations of speakers of languages, decide that they have to remain pure, and fight the (presumably negative) influence of alien tongues. So, when foreign borrowing comes into a language, it is assumed that the foreign word has somehow robbed a native word of its right to exist or flourish. The foreign word is demonized, and all sorts of decrees are set forth that it must never be used. Instead, a native alternative is proposed. However, this is kind of like stacking sandwich bags full of granola to hold back a flood. It just doesn't work. It denies a natural fact about languages: they borrow from one another all the time. Not only lexical items, but also phonology and even syntax. That's what languages do, and it's part of the natural process of change and evolution that languages undergo. This sort of protectionism seems to deny a natural fact about human nature, too. It's not only "outside" influences that can act on a language; inside influences also form a kind of collective push. Logically, when we want to see what a language will look like in thirty years, we have to look at young people who are speaking that language now. I don't know about you, but when I was a teenager, if some fusty old group of academics told me never to use the word taco and offered up instead some lame Anglicism like cornwrap, I probably would have shouted taco from every roof I could get to. The best way to get young people to do something is to tell them that they can't. So, probably a really good way to assure that something will creep into a language is to make it forbidden. There are a lot of other arguments against "protecting" languages from outside influence, and of course arguments for doing it, but instead of getting into any of that, I want to cite what I think might be an exception to my statement that "it just doesn't work": Icelandic. Icelandic, with all of its 300,000 native speakers, seems to be pretty "pure." Even the usual opportunities for borrowing from the outside are filled with bona fide Norse words. A computer is a tölva, a telephone is a sími, a television is a sjónvarp, and the internet is the net. These are all based not on borrowed English, French, Latin, Greek, or other roots, but on native Germanic roots. Tölva is (creatively!) formed from tölur (numbers) and völva (prophetess), sími means wire, sjónvarp comes from roots meaning sight and throw, and net is actually just plain net, which is Germanic. So how did Icelandic get away with what other languages try to force? Isolation probably has something to do with it, but it's not like Icelanders are completely cut off from the world. They're a pretty plugged-in society. They watch English and Danish TV, eat food from all over the world, read a heck of a lot, and welcome plenty of tourists. On the other hand, this hasn't always been the case, so it'll be interesting to see if more borrowings start to show up in the language. Icelandic attitudes about culture and language probably play a role, too. Icelanders are proud of their Viking stock, and they're proud that their language is so close to the language of those nearly mythical figures that they can pretty much understand the Sagas, written in Old Norse hundreds of years ago. It also helps that Iceland was once a colony of Denmark, Icelandic was thought of as a (lesser) dialect of Danish, and a movement for linguistic purity fit in nicely with a nationalist movement. But it seems that you need more than all of that. You need to have the speakers of the language behind the whole project. That may be easier when you're talking about 300,000 people instead of, say, 68,000,000 speakers of French across the globe. But even 300,000 is impressive. I once had a curious experience in Reykjavík that suggested to me that, unlike the linguistic purity movements in a lot of other countries, the one in Iceland is successful among its own people, who really do prefer something along the lines of cornwrap to taco. I'd been studying Icelandic for a few years, but was far from fluent. I was practicing with a very patient bartender who humored me, but I couldn't think of the word for typical or commonplace. When I asked him, he answered typpiskur, obviously a borrowing. But he quickly corrected himself, saying: "No, that's not right. It's algengur. That's better Icelandic." Tags: foreign borrowing, Icelandic, newsletter, purism
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