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| VOCABULARY DATABASE > ICELANDIC > INFORMATION |
Icelandic is a language belonging to the West Scandinavian family. It is spoken by some 250,000 people in Iceland.
The classical period of Icelandic literature (9th-14th c.) was contemporary to medieval Europe. In subsequent centuries, production in Icelandic attracted little attention abroad. During the 19th c., literature in this language experienced a renaissance.
Icelandic being probably the most archaic of the Scandinavian languages, most speakers can read ancient texts in Old Norse (from which Icelandic descended) without difficulty. In Icelandic there is noun declension, and auxiliary constructions make up for the existance of only two verb tenses. Language purity is a public concern in Iceland since the 19th c.: rather than borrow foreign words, new words are coined carefully.
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