| Also Known As: Icelandic,Islenska,Íslenska
Description:
Icelandic ( íslenska (help·info)) is a North Germanic language, the language of Iceland. Its closest relatives are Faroese and certain Norwegian dialects such as Telemark dialect and Sognamål.
While most West European languages have greatly reduced levels of inflection, particularly in regards to noun declension, Icelandic retains an inflectional grammar comparable to that of Latin (a member of the group of Italic languages, which shares the Indo-European roots of Germanic) or, more closely, Old Norse and Old English. The main difference between Icelandic and Latin lies in the treatment of the verb. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and other word classes are handled in a similar way. In particular it may be mentioned that Icelandic possesses quite a few instances of oblique cases without any governing word, much like Latin (e.g., many of the various Latin ablatives have a corresponding Icelandic dative).
Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages. It is the closest living relative of Faroese; these two languages, along with Norwegian, comprise the West Scandinavian languages, descended from the western dialects of Old Norse...... full article at Wikipedia |
