Icelandic grammar
is an inflected language with four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive, similar to that of modern German. Icelandic nouns can have one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in four cases and two numbers, singular and plural.
Morphology
Icelandic morphology is prototypical of Germanic/Indo-European languages. Nouns are declined for case, number, definiteness and gender; adjectives for case, number, gender and definiteness.Icelandic possesses only the definite article, which can stand on its own, or, as in other North Germanic languages, be attached to its modified noun. Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are three voices: active, passive and medial; but it may be debated whether the medial voice is a voice or simply an independent class of verbs. There are only two simple tenses, past and present, but to make up for that there are a number of auxiliary constructions, some of which may be regarded as tenses, others as aspects to varying degrees.
Nouns
Icelandic nouns are declined in four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. They belong to three main noun classes and can be inflected for number and definiteness. There are two main declension paradigms for nouns from all noun classes: strong and weak nouns, which are further divided in smaller groups for declension, according to many criteria The following table shows four examples of strong declension.| number | case | masculine | feminine | neuter | neuter |
| singular | hattur | borg | glas | gler | |
| singular | hatt | borg | glas | gler | |
| singular | hatti | borg | glasi | gleri | |
| singular | hatts | borgar | glass | glers | |
| plural | hattar | borgir | glös | gler | |
| plural | hatta | borgir | glös | gler | |
| plural | höttum | borgum | glösum | glerum | |
| plural | hatta | borga | glasa | glera |
The gender of a noun can often be surmised by looking at the ending of the word:
- Masculine nouns—often end in -ur, -i, -ll or -nn.
- Feminine nouns—often end in -a, -ing or -un.
- Neuter nouns usually have no ending or have a final accented vowel.
Articles
The examples below shows three nouns, one for each respective gender, declined in the nominative:
- masculine: drengur—" boy" becomes drengurinn—"the boy"
- feminine: stúlka—" girl" becomes stúlkan—"the girl"
- neuter: barn—" child" becomes barnið—"the child"
Pronouns
Personal
The personal pronouns in Icelandic are as follows:Icelandic has separate masculine, feminine and neuter words for they. When talking about a group of mixed gender people or items, the neuter form is used.
Like in English, the pronoun usually comes before the verb, as in the example below:
But, just as easily, the order of the sentence may be inverted. In this case, the pronoun moves to the end of the sentence:
In English, changing the word order like this would either render a phrase nonsensical or make it sound poetic. This is mainly due to the fact that whilst being a Germanic language, English has lost most of its noun declension. See syntax for more information.
Icelandic has also two extra lesser used personal pronouns. They are as follows:
| case | 1st person | 2nd person |
| vér | þér | |
| oss | yður | |
| oss | yður | |
| vor | yðar |
These two personal pronouns are now archaic. They are a leftover from the Old Icelandic use of a dual number along with the singular and plural when it came to the 1st and 2nd person pronouns. Modern Icelandic plural form of those pronouns are what were the dual number form, while the old plurals are now only used in formal speech.
Reflexive
Icelandic possesses a reflexive pronoun, functioning in much the same way as German sich. The nominative case does not exist.| case | pronoun |
| sig | |
| sér | |
| sín |
For example,
as opposed to being bathed by another,
as opposed to being dressed. The pronoun does not distinguish gender or number.
Possessive
Modern Icelandic has only possessive pronouns for the 1st person singular, 2nd person singular, and the 3rd person reflexive. They are as follows,where the three columns for each person represent masculine, feminine and neuter genders respectively. Minn means mine, þinn means yours and sinn means his, her, its or theirs.
If one is to indicate a possession for a person and number not amongst these pronouns the genitive of the corresponding personal pronoun is used.
Icelandic also has a possessive of the archaic personal pronoun vér. It is as follows:
This possessive is only used in formal and/or official situation, and means ours.
Demonstrative
The Icelandic demonstrative pronouns are as follows,where the three columns for each person represent masculine, feminine and neuter genders respectively. Þessi and sá roughly correspond to this/that and hinn means the other one of two.
Indefinite
There are around fifteen to twenty of these, depending on how they are counted. A paradigm for enginn is given below. It is inflected thus:Numerals
The numbers one to four are declined for the respective cases and genders:Other numbers are as follows and not declined, except for those that are actually nouns:
The word hundrað is actually a neuter noun, þúsund can be either feminine or neuter and the higher multiples of a thousand are either masculine or feminine, according to the ending. Núll is neuter. AdjectivesAdjectives must agree with the gender, number and grammatical case of the nouns they describe. For example, the word íslenskur agrees as follows:In strong declension, for example: Both íslenskri and konu are dative singular. In this case, the preposition með governs the case. This is an example of strong declension of adjectives. If an adjective is modified by the article, or most pronouns, weak declension is used. For this word it would be íslenskur: An example of weak declension: Veiku is the weak declension of veikur in the accusative singular. Konuna is also accusative singular, but with the definite article attached, and the article forces the adjective to be weak. Here the verb governs the case. The weak forms of nouns are often found in names of organisations, symbols, days and titles, for example:
VerbsThere are four moods in Icelandic: indicative, imperative, conditional, and subjunctive. As with most inflected languages, the verbs in Icelandic determine the case of the subsequent nouns, pronouns and adjectives of a sentence. For example:
There are three main groups of weak verbs in Icelandic: -ar, -ir, and -ur, referring to the endings that these verbs take when conjugated in the third person singular present. The strong verbs and the irregular verbs are a separate matter. Take the infinitive tala, for example: Note how, for each of the verb groups, the conjugations in the singular change but, in the plural, the endings are nearly always predictable. Most English present verbs are regular and have only one change in ending. In most cases in Icelandic, the conjugation patterns remain regular across most verbs. A verb's conjugation cannot be determined from its infinitive. Speakers must memorize which conjugation group a verb belongs to. Strong verbs fall into six groups augmented by reduplication verbs, each with exceptions. There is a classification system for all verbs, with the paradigms going into the dozens. Some Icelandic infinitives end with a -ja suffix. These verbs can be conjugated like -ur verbs, with the suffix lost in the first person singular. When conjugating -ja verbs, the single j must be removed, so syngja would become ég syng in the first person singular and not ég syngj. The j in itself is not a reliable indicator. Examples could be emja, which belongs to one class versus telja, belonging to another class,. The six primary conjugation classes are characterized as follow:
TensesStrictly speaking, there are only two simple tenses in Icelandic, simple present and simple past. All other tenses are formed using auxiliary constructions. For example, the present continuous is formed thus:This construction usually applies to only abstract concepts, and is not used for activities. For example, to sit would not use this construction. Instead, the simple present should be used. The collective tenses are:
The middle voice form of many verbs carries a slightly different meaning, and in some cases may carry a different meaning altogether. Some verbs survive only in their middle voice form, the other forms having been lost over time. The middle voice is generally used in the following situations to express:
The adverbs ending in -lega can be declined for comparison. This is a regular way to form adverbs. Another way is to take the neutral nominative singular of an adjective and turn it into an adverb: Another way is taking the stem of an adjective and add an a: Like in English, many common adverbs do not stick to these patterns but are adverbs in their own right: The basic adverbs of direction include: Inn and út denote motion, going in and going out. Other word classesPrepositionsIn Icelandic, prepositions determine the case of the following noun. Some examples are given below:
The case governed by prepositions depends on the context. The most frequent occurrence of this is determined by whether or not motion towards or away from is implied by the context: í, á, eftir, yfir and undir are all affected in this way. The following examples demonstrate this: Here the preposition á governs the accusative case because specific motion towards/away from is implied, i.e. going to the restaurant. In this example, the preposition á governs the dative; here the situation is static with no motion towards or away from implied. Yfir, undir and eftir all behave in the same way: Here the use of the accusative implies that the cat was not under the bed before, but is on its way there now. Here, the use of the dative implies an unchanging situation. Now the cat is still crawling, but within the confines of under the bed. Note that to govern the accusative, the preposition must imply movement towards or away from something, that is to say a changing situation. If the situation is static, i.e., the same at the end as it was at the start, then the preposition governs the dative. SyntaxBasic word orderIcelandic word order is SVO, generally speaking, with the subject and verb inverted in questions and when a sentence begins with an adverb. However, the inflectional system allows for considerable freedom in word order. For poetical purposes, every combination is possible, even the rare OSV. The phrase Helga Bjarni drap might well occur in, say, a ríma.Despite this, certain rules of syntax are relatively inflexible. For example, the finite verb must always be the second constituent of declarative sentences. Take the example below : Here the element var is the second constituent of the sentence. If we change the sentence, however: Here, var is still the second constituent of the sentence, despite the fact that it is not the second word in the sentence. The prepositional phrase árið 2000 counts as one constituent, and so for the verb to be the second constituent, it must come after 2000 and not after árið. The subject and object of the verb then follow. An exception to this rule arises when forming questions by inversion: and when turned into a question: Here the subject and verb have been inverted to form a question, meaning the verb is the first constituent in the sentence as opposed to the second. This method of forming questions is used in many languages, including English. QuestionsAs we have seen, questions can be easily formed by rearranging the order of the sentence from subject–verb–object to verb–subject–object. For example:can be made into a question as follows: The inversion rule still applies when interrogatives are involved, which are simply added to the front of the sentence. The interrogatives in Icelandic are:
CausativesIcelandic has a causative construction that can feel quite alien to English speakers. The word láta is used to mean "let" or "make". In one use, it is quite similar to English.
Sound shiftsThere are a number of sound shifts that occur in Icelandic, detailed below. The shifts occur very frequently across all word classes. For one of the most thorough books about the subject see Íslenzk málfræði handa æðri skólum.A-umlautThis is the oldest umlaut of all, attested in every Germanic language except, perhaps, Gothic. It comes in two varieties:This umlaut is no longer productive. U-umlautThe U-umlaut occurs when a stem vowel a changes to ö because of a u in the next syllable. This affects a only, and not á or au. Some examples:If there is an intermediate syllable between the first a and the u, then the U-shift does not take place. Although u-umlaut used to be completely regular in that every a followed by u was changed to ö, now there are new us that don't trigger it from the old norse -r ending. Everywhere -r didn't stand by a vowel an u was inserted in front of it, like in vanur from older vanr. This happened after u-umlaut had already taken place and therefore doesn't trigger it, causing a bit of irregularity in the Modern Icelandic u-umlaut U-umlaut is not to be confused with breaking although they appear similar. Note that if there are two a's preceding the u, the first a becomes an ö and the second becomes a u. An example: Exceptions to this include several borrowings, for instance banani—banana ⇒ banönum and Arabi—Arab ⇒ Aröbum. Though bönunum' is still used as well. There is also the "phantom" U-umlaut where some words historically ended in an -u but dropped the vowel, the change still occurs, some examples: Historically, there were four more additional forms of the U-umlaut; these are no longer productive or have been reversed. I-umlautThe I-umlaut is slightly more complex, and consists of the following vowel changes:The above effects of the I-umlaut are most visible in strong verbs. Take the verb hafa, for example: In the singular conjugation, the I-umlaut has caused the stem a to become an e. If we look at the plural conjugation however, we can see that the stem a remains intact here, with the notable exception of the 'við' form, where a U-umlaut has taken place. The I-shift affects verbs only in their singular conjugations. hefi, hefir, Less known, non-productive and reversed changes include: Other umlautsHistorically, there were many more umlauts in Icelandic, including
ElisionA form of elision occurs when asking questions in the second person; the verb and þú have a tendency to merge to ease pronunciation. This is reflected in writing, and so one would more often encounter talarðu as opposed to the expanded form talar þú. The actual change undergone here is the transformation of the voiceless dental fricative þ into the voiced dental fricative ð. This elision rule applies to many verbs, some having their own special forms. |