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Nothing like an Icelandic volcano to stir things up, is there?  A volcano under a glacier spewing ash at the world is even more exciting, even if nobody who isn’t Icelandic can pronouce its name.  Actually Eyjafjallajökull is the name of the glacier under which the volcano sits, but never mind. 

During the Ash cloud over Europe crisis, newscasters around the globe were struggling in the garden of vowels and consonents that is the Icelandic language. It became an international joke with Icelanders, for whom the tortuous syllables were a piece of cake, laughing the hardest. 

Icelandic is an ancient language with a highly inflected grammar that stops most foreigners dead in their tracks. We are talking about a language with four cases and three genders in which adjectives, and even proper nouns, are declined.  You use a different case of the word “Reykjavik”, for example,  if you are going to the city than if you are coming from it. Even  NUMBERS have genders. You  count to four in the masculine, feminine or neuter.

Numbers higher than four do not have genders (thank God) but they do have singulars and plurals and cases for each. Learning Icelandic any way but at your mother’s knee is next to impossible, although a few intrepid souls do manage (I am not one of them, I hasten to add) though I wish I were.

That said, the sound of this language is ancient and majestic.  This is not a light hearted tongue like French or Italian.  It is not a language made for high fashion and cocktail party chatter. It is stolid and serious and has great dignity.  You can virtually hear the wind and the sea in its undulating vowel sounds.  It is quite lovely to listen to—sort of a great grandfather to English where the odd word can be recognized in an ocean of unfamiliar sounds.

These days, the internet makes it possible for those of us not born to it, to successfully pronounce the unpronouncable. Eyjafjallajökull is three words strung together— eyja=island, fjalla=mountain and jökull=glacier  The trick is to think of them separately but to say them one after the other fast. It’s like jumping through a hoop. It just takes a little practice.

I found a really useful video on YouTube featuring an Icelandic singer in London who composed a song to help hapless anglophones get it. It’s a kind of Eyjafjallajökull tutorial which, with luck, will make you the first on your block to be able to pronounce the unpronouncable. Go ahead— give it a try. You can’t do any worse than the professional newscasters of the BBC and the AlJazeera English comentator who introduces the video below. With practice you will doubtless do much better.