Spreading the standard:The nineteenth-century standardization of Icelandic and the first Icelandic novel

Abstract

Abstract A literary standard for Icelandic was created in the nineteenth century. The main architects of this standard were scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature who turned to the language of the medieval Icelandic literature for linguistic models. Consequently, the resulting standard included a number of features from earlier stages of the language. This standard was successfully implemented despite the relatively weak institutional infrastructure in nineteenth-century Iceland. It is argued in this paper that the first Icelandic novel, Piltur og stúlka, appearing in 1850 and again in a revised edition in 1867, played an important role in spreading the standard. The novel championed the main ideological tenets of the prevailing language policy, and at the same time it was a showcase for the new standard. A rural love story set in contemporary Iceland, the novel was a welcome literary innovation. Most importantly, the subject matter appealed to children and adolescents in their formative years, and the novel thus became a powerful and persuasive vehicle for the new linguistic standard.