Icelandic and Swedish: Language Similarities and Differences
Icelandic and Swedish are part of the Scandinavian language family, which evolved from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings.
| Language | Country |
|---|---|
| Swedish | Sweden |
| Norwegian | Norway |
| Danish | Denmark |
| Icelandic | Iceland |
| Faroese | Faroe Islands |
Icelandic is much less similar to Swedish than Swedish is to Norwegian or Danish. A Swedish speaker can understand Norwegian or Danish to some extent but can’t understand Icelandic.
Icelandic has kept many complicated grammatical features that have disappeared from Swedish.
That explains why Icelandic is difficult to learn (it’s among the hardest languages), while Swedish is relatively easy (it’s one of the easiest languages).
Despite their common origin, Swedish and Icelandic have become quite different. Swedish has changed a lot, and Icelandic has changed much less. The reason has to do with the geographical isolation of Iceland.
Reykjavík (the capital of Iceland) is about 1300 miles from Stockholm (the capital of Sweden). Nowadays, that doesn’t sound like that much, but before the invention of the engine, it could take nearly a week to sail that distance.
From the settlement of Iceland, which started during the 9th century, up to the current era, the geographical isolation of Iceland has sheltered Icelandic from the influence of other languages.
As a result, Icelandic has remained relatively close to the Old Norse language. Because the Icelandic language has not changed that much, Icelandic speakers can still read Old Icelandic sagas from the 12th century.
To put that in perspective, Old English texts (like the epic poem Beowulf) are incomprehensible to modern English speakers, so they are translated into modern English.
While Icelandic is an Insular Scandinavian language, Swedish is a Continental Scandinavian language — and it has evolved in close contact with other languages from the European continent.
Sweden is less than 70 miles from Germany across the Baltic Sea. During the Middle Ages, some Swedish cities participated in the Hanseatic League, a German-speaking trade network.
During that period, some German vocabulary words entered the Swedish language.
Icelandic and Swedish: similarities and differences in vocabulary
Icelandic has many vocabulary words that come from Old Norse; and so does Swedish. That is why there are many similar vocabulary words between Icelandic and Swedish. Here are some examples:
| English | Icelandic 🇮🇸 |
Swedish 🇸🇪 |
|---|---|---|
| friend | vinur | vän |
| to love | elska | älska |
| word | orð | ord |
| expensive | dýr | dyr |
| old | gamall | gammal |
| forest | skógur | skog |
| to say | segja | säga |
| month | mánuður | månad |
| victory | sigur | seger |
| food | matur | mat |
| salary | laun | lön |
| to invite | bjóða | bjuda |
| to grow | vaxa | växa |
Swedish and Icelandic are different languages; they are certainly not dialects of the same language. You can easily find examples of Swedish-Icelandic word pairs that are completely different from one another.
Oftentimes, it is because Swedish adopted a loanword from German which replaced the term it has gotten from Old Norse.
The table below has some examples of Swedish and Icelandic words that are very different.
| English | Icelandic 🇮🇸 |
Swedish 🇸🇪 |
|---|---|---|
| work | vinna | arbete |
| telephone | sími | telefon |
| question | spurning | fråga |
| kitchen | eldhús | kök |
| hungry | svangur | hungrig |
| difficult | erfiður | svår |
| shy | feiminn | blyg |
| silent | þögull | tyst |
| beautiful | fallegur | skön |
Old Norse initially used a runic alphabet but later transitioned to a Latin alphabet. Icelandic and Swedish also use a Latin alphabet, and each has some extra letters.
For example, the letters ‘ð’ and ‘þ’ are used in Icelandic but not Swedish (the second one comes from a rune). Then there are the letters ‘å’ and ‘ä,’ used in Swedish but not Icelandic.
Compared to Swedish, Icelandic has been less influenced by other languages
For centuries, the geographical isolation of Iceland has sheltered Icelandic from the influence of other languages.
In today’s era of global media and the internet, linguistic influence is no longer limited by geographical isolation as it was in the past. Despite this, Icelanders have adopted an active policy of limiting the inclusion of foreign loanwords into their language.
Icelanders prefer creating new words instead of incorporating loanwords into Icelandic. For instance, they coined the word “tölvupóstur” for “email” and “sími” for “telephone”.
Swedish, on the other hand, has been in close contact with other languages for centuries. For instance, during the Middle Ages, some Swedish cities participated in the Hanseatic League, a trading union that had Middle Low German as its trade language.
As a result, some Swedish vocabulary words are loanwords from German. (see this comparison of German and Swedish for examples)
Icelandic grammar is more complicated than Swedish grammar
In many languages, nouns have a grammatical gender. This is particularly common among European languages.
In Icelandic, each noun has one of 3 possible genders (masculine, feminine, or neuter). Swedish is simpler in this regard, with Swedish nouns having one of 2 possible genders (common and neuter).
Grammatical cases: Icelandic nouns are declined, but not Swedish nouns
Icelandic nouns are declined according to 4 grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive). This means that the ending of the noun changes depending on its grammatical function in a sentence.
Just as noun case declensions (which were present in Old English) disappeared from modern English, these were also present in Old Swedish and disappeared from modern Swedish.
Icelandic is a more conservative language than other Germanic languages like Swedish and English, so Icelandic has kept some grammatical features that have disappeared from these other languages.
Verb conjugations in Swedish vs. Icelandic
In contrast to Icelandic, Swedish verbs do not conjugate according to number and person. In Swedish, the same verb form is used for all subject pronouns.
For example, here is the verb “to be” and its conjugation tables in Swedish and Icelandic:
In Icelandic and Swedish, the infinitive form of most verbs ends in -a. Examples of common Swedish verbs can be seen in this list of the 1000 most common Swedish words.
Grammatical articles
In Icelandic and in Swedish, the definite article (which corresponds to the English word “the”) is usually a suffix added to the noun rather than a word placed in front of it. This is a fairly common feature among Scandinavian languages.
Indefinite articles (which correspond to the English words “a” and “an”) exist in Swedish —but not in Icelandic.
Swedish is easier to learn than Icelandic
Icelandic is rather difficult to learn; it appears on our list of the hardest languages (for English speakers to learn). In contrast, Swedish is relatively easy. It’s on our list of the easiest languages.
The substantial difference in learning difficulty between Swedish and Icelandic is apparent in how these languages are rated by the US Foreign Service Institute (FSI).
Based on their experience teaching languages to diplomats, the FSI ranks languages in 4 categories according to their learning difficulty.
Swedish is in Category I (the easiest category) alongside other accessible languages such as Spanish and Italian.
Icelandic, on the other hand, is classified in category III, alongside some notoriously difficult languages such as Hungarian and Finnish.
Which language should you learn first, Swedish or Icelandic?
One advantage of learning Swedish is that it is very similar to Norwegian and Danish. (see these comparisons of Swedish vs Norwegian, and Swedish vs Danish)
Learning Swedish makes these other two Nordic languages (Norwegian and Danish) accessible.
On the other hand, because Icelandic is so similar to Old Norse, knowing Icelandic can enable one to read Old Norse literature, such as the famous Sagas.
Another factor to take into consideration when choosing between learning Swedish or Icelandic is that there are approximately 30 times more native Swedish speakers than there are native Icelandic speakers (10 million vs 300 thousand).
Because Icelandic is significantly more difficult than Swedish, particularly in terms of its grammar, language learners who do not enjoy grammar may prefer learning Swedish rather than Icelandic.
References:- [1] (Map license)