Comment on ‘Icelandic girls can’t be called Harriet, government tells family’
During this year’s European Football Championship, the whole world’s attention seemed to have shifted to one small nation with a population of little more than 330,000 people. I certainly wouldn’t have cared about any goings-on around football if said nation hadn’t been Iceland, a country that is very high on my list of places to visit. During that time, a Guardian article with the title of ‘Icelandic girls can’t be called Harriet, government tells family’, showed up in my suggested readings. The article starts by mockingly listing some more or less common Icelandic names, thus implying that it would somehow be surprising that people’s names in different countries don’t necessarily match frequently used names in Britain. The article then reports that Icelandic authorities have refused to renew the passport of the 10-year old Harriet, daughter of an Icelandic mother and a British father, due to the fact that her name is not on the National Registry’s list of approved Icelandic names.
As someone who is interested in the way language works and the quirks and unique characteristics of different languages, I am quite partial to Iceland’s puristic approach to language and I don’t think that the reasoning behind it is as bad as the Guardian article makes it out to be. As Iceland is such a small nation, Icelandic people tend to be very proud and protective of their culture and language. The Icelandic language hasn’t changed that much over the last thousand years. To ensure that it stays that way and to prevent having to rely on loanwords, there’s a committee which comes up with Icelandic words for new things such as new pieces of technology. For example, the Icelandic word for computer is ‘tölva’, a mixture between the words ‘tala’ (which means number) and ‘völva’ (which is the Icelandic word for furtune teller). Similarly, if you want to tell someone in Icelandic that you’re using Google to look something up, you wouldn’t just use ‘google’ as a verb, you’d use the much more Icelandic sounding ‘að gúgla’, which can be conjugated. Well, if Icelanders go to such lengths to preserve their language, the notion that someone wouldn’t be allowed to be called Harriet there (or at least not if they don’t have an Icelandic second name) doesn’t sound that surprising anymore, does it?
Personally, I love the English language and I’d choose a book written in English over a German translation any day, yet I prefer not to rely on it too heavily when speaking German. It just sounds halting and clumsy to me. This already starts with finding the appropriate article. For example, if I want to refer to the UK simply as ‘UK’ instead of having to say ‘das Vereinigte Königreich’, Duden tells me to use ‘das UK’. While that makes sense when looking at the translation, it still sounds wrong to my ears. And if someone is talking in German about what’s been going on with their ‘family’ lately, but, for some mysterious reason, they’re using the English word for ‘Familie’, I might try to take them seriously, but rest assured that it’s gonna be tough. So from that perspective, I respect Iceland’s efforts to preserve their language.
Another thing that comes into play with the Icelandic naming laws is that in Icelandic, almost every word is stressed on the first syllable, and Icelandic is a highly inflected language, more so than German. The Icelandic language uses declension and conjugation and has four cases, nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Even the numbers one to four, as well as proper names, are declined in all cases. Another thing that might lead to some confusion is the existence of the i- and u-umlaut, which is the reason why a person named Anna is referred to as ‘Önnu’ in all cases other than the nominative. Foreign names that end in letters that don’t correspond to these grammar rules can therefore not be declined. That doesn’t mean that Icelandic people cannot talk about foreigners at all — among other things, that would make news reports pretty difficult. But it does sound weird or grammatically wrong for an Icelandic speaking person to refer to people with foreign names in a sentence, so they might try to alter it so that it fits the declension rules. While it might be acceptable when you only have to refer to people with foreign names occasionally, it would probably be more tedious when you had to constantly use incorrect grammar when referring to someone you personally interact with on a regular basis. In the light of that, Iceland’s list of approved names is a bit more understandable.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that Iceland’s naming laws are flawless. While names are not the most important part of a person, they’re still part of people’s identities, and any restriction that goes beyond saying that you shouldn’t name your kid Coca Cola is questionable. Obviously, that raises the question whether Icelandic grammar is just too archaic in this day and age and whether it wouldn‘t be more practical to adjust the Icelandic language and come up with a grammatical way to deal with all foreign names, like a new declension. But surely, whether or not that’s a problem that does need changing in the long run is something for the Icelandic people to decide.
