Iceland's former prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, has said that the Icelandic language could be wiped out in as little as a generation due to the sweeping rise of AI and encroaching English language dominance.
Katrín, who stood down as prime minister last year to run for president after seven years in office, said Iceland was undergoing "radical" change when it came to language use. More people are reading and speaking English, and fewer are reading in Icelandic, a trend she says is being exacerbated by the way language models are trained.
She made the comments before her appearance at the Iceland Noir crime fiction festival in Reykjavík after the surprise release of her second novel of the genre, which she co-wrote with Ragnar Jónasson.
"A lot of languages disappear, and with them dies a lot of value[and] a lot of human thought," she said. Icelandic has only about 350,000 speakers and is among the world's least-altered languages.
"Having this language that is spoken by so very few, I feel that we carry a huge responsibility to actually preserve that. I do not personally think we are doing enough to do that," she said, not least because young people in Iceland "are absolutely surrounded by material in English, on social media and other media".
Katrín has said that Iceland has been "quite proactive" in pushing for AI to be usable in Icelandic. Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with Iceland's ministry of education, one of the world's first national AI education pilots. The partnership is a nationwide pilot across Iceland – giving hundreds of teachers across Iceland access to AI tools.
During her time in government, Katrín said they could see the "threats and dangers of AI" and the importance of ensuring that Icelandic texts and books were used to train it.
Ragnar Jónasson, her co-author, agreed that the language was in grave danger. "We are just a generation away from losing this language because all of these huge changes," he said.
"They are reading more in English, they are getting their information from the internet, from their phones, and kids in Iceland are even conversing in English sometimes between themselves."
Citing what happened when Iceland was under Danish rule until 1918, when the Icelandic language was subjected to Danish influence, Katrín said changes could happen "very quickly".
"We have seen that before here in Iceland because we of course were under the Danes for quite a long time and the Danish language had a lot of influence on the Icelandic language."
Thatchange, however, was turned around rapidly by a strong movement by Icelanders, she added.
"Maybe we need a stronger movement right now to talk about why do we want to preserve the language? That is really the big thing that we should be talking about here in Iceland," she said, adding that the "fate of a nation" could be decided on how it treated its language, as language shaped the way people thought.
While there are "amazing opportunities" that AI could present, she said it posed enormous challenges to authors and the creative industry as a whole.
Previously, she thought that the existence of human authors was important to readers, but after discovering that people had forged relationships with AI she was now not so sure.
"We are in a very challenging time and my personal opinion is that governments should stay very focused on the development of AI."
Amid all the change and talk of AI domination, Katrín hopes her new book, which soared to the top of the charts in Iceland and is set in 1989 in Fáskrúðsfjörður, a remote village in eastern Iceland, connects with readers on a human level.
On research trips the writers spoke to villagers who were working in Icelandic media in the 1980s for background on their lead character, who is a journalist.
"I hope this is something people experience as something authentic and coming from the heart," she said.
For Katrín, reading and writing have always been therapeutic. "You learn more empathy when you read about others, you understand yourself better," she said.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday November 23, @01:22AM (3 children)
Here's their Eurovision 2017 [youtu.be] contest entry. By which I mean, it's the only Eurovision contest entry I know about. Also, on that day I learned what Eurovision was, and that they held a song contest.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday November 24, @07:44PM
> Also, on that day I learned what Eurovision was, and that they held a song contest.
A life changing moment, I am sure.
You should be aware that in Europe, Eurovision has a major role in foreign policy
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly2yey51wko [bbc.co.uk]
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Tuesday November 25, @05:11AM
Consider yourself lucky...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, @01:27PM
Haven't you heard this one before? Domenico Modugno - Nel blu dipinto di blu ("Volare"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DPAb9-Stmo [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF9mRDW6Gg8 [youtube.com]
OK so it only got 3rd place but I think it's kinda famous...
There's also Waterloo by ABBA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJBNJ2wq0Y [youtube.com]
Honorable mention - SunStroke Project & Olia Tira - Run Away - 🇲🇩 Moldova: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECyeUYsU14E [youtube.com]
This did even worse - only 22nd place out of 25 in the competition but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez8m4PXksQs [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday November 23, @03:24AM (4 children)
And do what with that focus? My view is that it's not the government's business to "focus" on the fad du jour, but to serve their citizens. And I don't consider keeping Icelandic alive to be a useful Iceland government function either. If Katrín Jakobsdóttir wants to preserve the Icelandic language, she can do it herself with other like-minded people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by zocalo on Sunday November 23, @09:02AM (3 children)
Jakobsdóttir is a politician, which means she is pandering to certain voting demographics and trying to better Iceland's economy (amongst other things). If there's one thing the AI industry desperately wants at the moment it's somewhere to build DCs with ready supplies of power, and if that can be green too then so much the better. Iceland has both power for DCs and the space to put them in spades. That means there's a significant economic opportunity for Iceland if some of those data centres are built there, or some of the many existing crypto mining ones already there can be repurposed. It's all cash and jobs, and when AI bubble pops they can be either be repurposed to the next fad or, failing that, they can always be used as somewhere to keep the sheep and cattle over winter. Which would be kinda amusing, given some of the early Icelandic crypto mines were converted barns - the Icelandic version of the Saudi oil "camel, limousine, camel" sequence.
As for preserving the Icelandic language, linguistically it has quite an interesting structure and traces back to old Norse, so it's another Latin if you're into the study of historic languages for any reason, but I'm guessing this is more about pandering to voting demographics. Iceland has a strong literary culture (or had, the youth may be more into emojis these days) and there is almost certainly a strong overlap between those who like well-written works of literature and those old enough to prefer Icelandic over English as their local lingua franca. Proportionally, that's going to quite a large block of voters.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 25, @11:50AM (2 children)
So in other words, Jakobsdottir is making noise about this because she wants to simultaneously pander to her base and get that sweet AI swag - maybe negotiating a better deal too.
What language used by living people doesn't have an interesting structure? So now that I've changed the optics, how does that matter to my original post? Sounds like a bunch of noise to provide cover for land use permitting that would have happened anyway. If we try to take it seriously, we still end up with my original observation: a "focus" without purpose and a concern about linguistics that government intervention neither has a place for or a way to help.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 26, @12:51PM (1 child)
English - because it's the most widely broken language in the world... 🤣
We ain't need no structure... Well sometimes some do but whatever...
okok there are interesting structures: https://knowadays.com/blog/the-bad-big-wolf-a-proofreaders-guide-to-adjective-order/ [knowadays.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 26, @05:40PM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Sunday November 23, @11:38AM
At least for AI. I would argue that AI (aka chatbot) helps to retain native languages. I know persons not fluent in English who can now use the chatbots to solve technical problems in their native language. Precise translations make it less urgent to learn English.
OTHO, other cultural influences and choices (of the youth) certainly do put pressure on many languages. The US, however, is doing all in their might to reverse this trend at the moment.