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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.
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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 were 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.
