Fun with the Icelandic language and names

Names in Iceland

While in Iceland you may run into several people with the same name. That’s because of their unusual patronymic naming system wherein they add the suffix -son (for a son) or -dóttir (for a daughter) to the child’s father’s first name to create the child’s last name. So if a girl’s first name is Anna and her father is Davis, her name is Anna Davisdóttir.

Obviously, this can lead to a lot of people with the same name, especially since (other than with special permission), all children have to be given names that are pre-approved by the Icelandic Naming Committee. Each year, more names are added as acceptable for girls or boys (you can’t use a boy’s name for a girl, or vice versa), but still, it isn’t an infinite list. Needless to say, a phone book is a challenge even with “only” 350,000 people on the island.

This also means that people in the same family have different last names. Also, women keep their names when they get married. Because of these differences from most of the world, Icelandic actually has words for the relationship between people with identical names.

Names for things in Iceland

Back in 1918 (when Iceland won its independence from Denmark), they decided to keep the language pure by not taking loan words from other languages but instead making their own. Even today, most Icelandic people learn Icelandic as their native language (and then also learn English, German or other languages as well).

This means that when new technologies were invented and new products/ideas/animals/etc reached the island, the Icelandic people (well, actually a government group) had to make up names for them using simple pre-existing words from the ancient language (which hasn’t changed much in nearly a millennium). When new words are needed, they’re often created by putting two words together, through fusion or simple compounding. The result can be charming.

For example, the word for computer fuses the word for number and the word for prophetess, which gives you the elegant “prophetess of numbers.” Dimples are “fun pots”. The word for telephone is an old word for “long thread”. Planes are “zooms”. Old style walkmans were called “pocket discos” 🙂 AIDS is something akin to “to destroy totally”, a truthful if painful moniker. Animal names are quite magical. A sloth is a “lazy animal”, a turtle is a “shield back” and a raccoon is a “washing bear”.

Thankfully, they did allow an exception for some things (like words to do with road traffic to standardize with Europe)

For more fun Icelandic words and their English equivalent – check out Every Single Word in Icelandic on Instagram.