Dominance of English and rise of artificial intelligence 'threaten Icelandic language'

Iceland's former prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir has warned that the Icelandic language could be wiped out in as little as a generation because of the rise of AI and encroaching English language dominance.

- Miranda Bryant

Katrín, who stood down as prime minister last year to run for president after seven years in office, said Iceland was undergoing “radical” change when it came to language use. More people were reading and speaking English, and fewer were reading in Icelandic, a trend she said was being exacerbated by the way language models were trained.

Her comments came before her appearance at the Iceland Noir crime fiction festival in Reykjavík after the surprise release of her second Icelandic noir crime novel, which she co-wrote with Ragnar Jónasson.

“A lot of languages disappear, and with them dies a lot of value [and] a lot of human thought,” she said. Icelandic only has around 350,000 speakers and is among the world's least altered languages.

“Having this language that is spoken by so very few, I feel that we carry a huge responsibility to actually preserve that. I do not personally think we are doing enough to do that,” she said, not least because young people in Iceland “are absolutely surrounded by material in English, on social media and other media”.