Icelandic

Icelandic or Icelandish (/aɪsˈlændɪk/ eyess-LAN-dik, /aɪsˈlændɪʃ/ eyess-LAN-dish; endonym: íslenska, pronounced [ˈi(ː)stlɛnska] , íslensk tunga [ˈi(ː)stlɛnsk ˈtʰuŋka]) is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken by about 390,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland, where it is the national language. Since it is a West Scandinavian language, it is most closely related to Faroese, western Norwegian dialects, and the extinct language Norn. It is not mutually intelligible with the continental Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) and is more distinct from the most widely spoken Germanic languages, English and German. The written forms of Icelandic and Faroese are very similar, but their spoken forms are not mutually intelligible.

The Icelandic language is more conservative than most other Germanic languages. Most have greatly reduced levels of inflection (particularly noun declension), but Icelandic retains a four-case synthetic grammar (comparable to German, though considerably more conservative and synthetic) and is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Icelandic vocabulary is also deeply conservative, with the country's language regulator maintaining an active policy of coining terms based on older Icelandic words rather than directly taking in loanwords from other languages.