Monolingualism in Iceland – Icelandic Language Planning II

In the previous episode, we’ve seen the status planning 
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2. Corpus planning

Quoting Wright (2007): “corpus planning is an attempt to change the forms and structures of the language itself. This task is often undertaken by national language planning agencies, whose role differs according to the situation. Where a spoken language is being adopted for official use there will need to be codification and standardization to create a written form. For a language which is already written, the agency may be asked to elaborate new terms for new technologies and domains in order to avoid borrowing from other languages.”
The current pattern of the Icelandic language was developed throughout the 19th century, a period of growing nationalist awareness in Iceland.

Standardization of Icelandic

In drawing up the standard, two prominent issues were taken into account: the first being the veneration of the language of medieval Icelandic literature, so its application as a linguistic ideal was sought, and the second the concern with the purity of the Icelandic language and the need for purge it of foreign influence, especially Danish influence.
The “architects” of the pattern thus searched the language of medieval Icelandic literature for linguistic models and ideals, whereby a large part of the properties that were selected for inclusion in the pattern was taken from manuscripts dating back to the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries. Consequently, the resulting pattern includes several features that go back to significantly earlier stages of the language.
Furthermore, the elaboration of the standard was guided by the effort to reject foreign linguistic influence. Quoting the professor himself, Iceland is an interesting case of how corpus planning can be taken to an extreme, this due to the institutionalization of neologisms (ie, the process of creating a new word in the language due to the need to designate new objects or concepts) formed strictly from Icelandic roots. Icelandic linguistic ideology rejects the borrowing of words from other languages, so it resorts to the creation of neologisms. The intention is to reject the loans creating words of Icelandic origin.
Iceland’s linguistic ideology prefigures what is called purism. Linguistic purism reflects the belief that languages ​​must resist the linguistic influence of others. To quote the professor again, linguistic purism consists of an essentialist view of language and corresponds to a large extent to the same essentialist view of nationalist ideology. Nationalism, as a political, national, and identity ideology, often leads to a purist interpretation of language and a rejection of what is not understood as internal to that language.