Icelandic is in Danger of Dying Out Because of AI and English-Language Media, Says Former PM
An Anonymous Coward writes:
Iceland's former prime minister, Katrin Jakobsdottir, has said that the Icelandic language could be wiped out in as little as a generation due to the sweeping rise of AI and encroaching English language dominance.
Katrin, who stood down as prime minister last year to run for president after seven years in office, said Iceland was undergoing "radical" change when it came to language use. More people are reading and speaking English, and fewer are reading in Icelandic, a trend she says is being exacerbated by the way language models are trained.
She made the comments before her appearance at the Iceland Noir crime fiction festival in Reykjavik after the surprise release of her second novel of the genre, which she co-wrote with Ragnar Jonasson.
"A lot of languages disappear, and with them dies a lot of value[and] a lot of human thought," she said. Icelandic has only about 350,000 speakers and is among the world's least-altered languages.
"Having this language that is spoken by so very few, I feel that we carry a huge responsibility to actually preserve that. I do not personally think we are doing enough to do that," she said, not least because young people in Iceland "are absolutely surrounded by material in English, on social media and other media".
Katrin has said that Iceland has been "quite proactive" in pushing for AI to be usable in Icelandic. Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with Iceland's ministry of education, one of the world's first national AI education pilots. The partnership is a nationwide pilot across Iceland - giving hundreds of teachers across Iceland access to AI tools.
During her time in government, Katrin said they could see the "threats and dangers of AI" and the importance of ensuring that Icelandic texts and books were used to train it.
Ragnar Jonasson, her co-author, agreed that the language was in grave danger. "We are just a generation away from losing this language because all of these huge changes," he said.
"They are reading more in English, they are getting their information from the internet, from their phones, and kids in Iceland are even conversing in English sometimes between themselves."
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.