| Right, everyone, let's make a start. |
| Over the past few sessions, |
| we've been considering the reasons why some world languages are in decline, |
| and today I'm going to introduce another factor that affects languages, |
| and the speakers of those languages, |
| and that's technology, and, in particular, digital technology. |
| In order to illustrate its effect, |
| I'm going to focus on the Icelandic language, |
| which is spoken by around 321,000 people, |
| most of whom live in Iceland - an island in the North Atlantic Ocean. |
| The problem for this language is not the number of speakers, |
| even though this number is small. |
| Nor is it about losing words to other languages, such as English. |
| In fact, the vocabulary of Icelandic is continually increasing |
| because when speakers need a new word for something, |
| they tend to create one, rather than borrowing from another language. |
| All this makes Icelandic quite a special language, |
| it's changed very little in the past millennium, |
| yet it can handle twenty-first-century concepts related to the use of computers and digital technology. |
| Take, for example, the word for web browser... |
| this is vafri in Icelandic, |
| which comes from the verb 'to wander'. |
| I can't think of a more appropriate term because that's exactly what you do mentally when you browse the internet. |
| Then there's an Icelandic word for podcast, |
| which is too hard to pronounce! |
| And so on. |
| Icelandic, then, is alive and growing, but - and it's a big but, |
| young Icelanders spend a great deal of time in the digital world |
| and this world is predominantly English. |
| Think about smartphones. |
| They didn't even exist until comparatively recently, |
| but today young people use them all the time to read books, watch TV or films, |
| play games, listen to music, and so on. |
| Obviously, this is a good thing in many respects because it promotes their bilingual skills, |
| but the extent of the influence of English in the virtual world is staggering |
| and it's all happening really fast. |
| For their parents and grandparents, |
| the change is less concerning because they already have their native-speaker skills in Icelandic. |
| But for young speakers - |
| well, the outcome is a little troubling. |
| For example, teachers have found that playground conversations in Icelandic secondary schools |
| can be conducted entirely in English, |
| while teachers of much younger children have reported situations |
| where their classes find it easier to say what is in a picture using English, rather than Icelandic. |
| The very real and worrying consequence of all this |
| is that the young generation in Iceland is at risk of losing its mother tongue. |
| Of course, this is happening to other European languages too, |
| but while internet companies might be willing to offer, say, French options in their systems, |
| it's much harder for them to justify the expense of doing the same for a language |
| that has a population the size of a French town, such as Nice. |
| The other drawback of Icelandic is the grammar, |
| which is significantly more complex than in most languages. |
| At the moment, the tech giants are simply not interested in tackling this. |
| So, what is the Icelandic government doing about this? |
| Well, large sums of money are being allocated to a language technology fund |
| that it is hoped will lead to the development of Icelandic sourced apps |
| and other social media and digital systems, |
| but clearly this is going to be an uphill struggle. |
| On the positive side, |
| they know that Icelandic is still the official language of education and government. |
| It has survived for well over a thousand years |
| and the experts predict that its future in this nation state is sound and will continue to be so. |
| However, there's no doubt that it's becoming an inevitable second choice in young people's lives. |
| This raises important questions. |
| When you consider how much of the past is tied up in a language, |
| will young Icelanders lose their sense of their own identity? |
| Another issue that concerns the government of Iceland is this. |
| If children are learning two languages through different routes, |
| neither of which they are fully fluent in, |
| will they be able to express themselves properly? |