Language policies in Iceland in the period 1920–1950 were underpinned by a prevailing language culture characterized by a traditional purist language ideology, deeply rooted in Icelandic nationalism and Icelandic literary tradition. Iceland had gained political independence from Denmark in 1918, and the Republic of Iceland was founded in 1944. It is not unusual that periods with strong national sentiment are at the same time characterized by linguistic purism (cf. Thomas 1991). Common language policy discourses in this period contained among other things claims such as that Icelanders must honor their linguistic heritage to be entitled to form an independent national state (cf. e.g. Hálfdanarson 2005).
British troops occupied Iceland in May 1940. There were about 25,000 British and Canadian soldiers in Iceland to begin with, and from 1941 onward the US Navy sent twice as many troops to the country. Most of the English-speaking soldiers were stationed in and around the small capital Reykjavik (Karlsson 2000), which at the time was a town of merely 40,000 local people.
In this paper, language discourses in Iceland in the 1940s will be analyzed and discussed, against the backdrop of the sudden presence of the relatively large number of English speakers.
The data used for the present investigation were primarily retrieved from a variety of newspaper items, articles and periodicals in the 1940s, written by members of the Icelandic cultural and intellectual elite, who ardently promoted nationalist language ideologies, and who saw the presence of English speaking soldiers as a serious threat to Icelandic language and culture. While Allied Forces never met any military resistance by locals in Iceland, they were thus met with an informal cultural resistance movement.
References:
Hálfdanarson, Guðmundur. 2005: From Linguistic Patriotism to Cultural Nationalism: Language and Identity in Iceland. In: Isaacs, A.K. (ed.): Languages and Identities in Historical Perspective. Pisa: Edizioni Plus. Pp. 55‒66.
Karlsson, Gunnar. 2000: The History of Iceland. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Thomas, George. 1991: Linguistic purism: Longman.
