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Iceland's language technology: policy versus practice

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14664200903554966

1747-7506

Amanda Hilmarsson-Dunn, Ari Páll Kristinsson,

Hungarian Social, Economic and Educational Studies

Abstract Iceland's language policies are purist and protectionist, aiming to maintain the grammatical system and basic vocabulary of Icelandic as it has been for a thousand years and to keep the language free of foreign (English) borrowings. In order to use Icelandic in the domain of information technology, there has been a major investment in language technology. However, this is expensive and time-consuming, and some feel that, with a population conversant in English, the effort to constantly adapt and translate new technologies from English is not worthwhile. This paper aims to examine Iceland's policies for IT and to investigate whether they can be maintained in practice. Keywords: language technologycorpus planningideologylanguage policyglobalisationIcelandic Acknowledgements Part of this paper also appeared in Hilmarsson-Dunn and Kristinsson (2008) Hilmarsson-Dunn, A. M. and Kristinsson, A. P. 2008. "Iceland's language technology: Policy versus practice". In Proceedings of the BAAL Annual Conference 2007, London: Scitsiugnil Press. [Google Scholar]. Notes The word bank was established by the Icelandic Language Institute in 1997, since 2006 part of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. This survey was carried out in order to get a general idea of how much English is used by students in Iceland and their attitudes towards English in certain domains, including IT. Embla was the name of the first woman created by the Gods in Norse mythology.