This is the illusionist in which I Helen Zoltzman left language at my ex-boyfriend's sister's house about 12 years ago.

People are still talking about it.

This episode is the first of a pair about the Icelandic language, the challenges it's currently facing, and how new words are coined for it and added to the lexicon.

Because there's an official process, it's not like English where nobody decides whether or not a new word is allowed. The words just catch on or they don't.

Which is how we wound up with webinar.

On with the show.

The Icelandic language is spoken by about 320,000 people, most of them in Iceland a few thousand in Denmark and smattering elsewhere.

It evolved from a western Norse dialect after Norwegian settled in Iceland towards the end of the 9th century.

And although it diverged from Norwegian language thereafter, Icelandic has stayed recognisably similar to its earlier form for many centuries, particularly since 1780, when students proposed a policy of linguistic purism to protect Icelandic language from encroachment of words from other languages such as Danish, French and English, and to weed out the ones that had already landed there replacing them with words constructed from Icelandic elements or repurposed old words.

In 1964, the Icelandic government established the Icelandic language council and in 1985, the Icelandic language institute, which is now part of the Arnie Magnusen Institute for Icelandic studies.

These organisations are tasked with advising on language, providing guidelines and dealing with questions from the public and deciding new vocabulary in Icelandic.

My name is Alkustar Thorbustotir, I'm a project manager at the Institute.

My name is Johan, I'm a bi-sigterx-on, and I'm an assistant research professor at the Institute of the language planning department, and mainly specialised in Norseography and things like that, but also like Augusta work in parts on terminology.

The language planning also. So what kind of things does language planning cover?

The most important thing is maybe what is Alkustar's main job is working with terminal logical committees in many special fields, for example, engineering or sports, or chemistry or whatever.

I work with specialists in each field and try to make terminal logical lists of their fields, translations of these common words that are used for special words used in different fields.

This is a part of language preservation on planning, because we are helping people to find Icelandic words for usually English words that are used in many of these fields.

We can say the official language policy, Icelandic is useful and used in all fields of society in one sentence.

How many people are on the committee?

There are many committees, but they can't be from just one person to maybe ten. That's unusual.

Three, five persons, it's useful. Is it difficult to agree?

No, it's useful. It's voluntary work.

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