>>> Icelandic is very hard to learn. Once you have learned it, the only place >>> you can use >>> it is in iceland. I have known people who studied Icelandic for years but >>> were still >>> unable to converse adequately in Iceland. I would like to learn it also, >>> just enough >>> so that I could pronounce words correctly.
And considering there are only about 300,000 Icelanders, even if you go to Iceland, you won't have many people to talk to there. How many billions of humans on the planet now? Iceland is a teeny-tiny speck on this earth, and for that reason, it's about the last language I'd ever try to learn with any seriousness. The horses are really cool, and the country looks pretty in the pictures, but in overall world political importance...well, it's not. Here's a list of the top 50 languages of the world, ranked by the number of people who speak them. http://www.photius.com/rankings/languages2.html Numbers 49 and 50 (Yoruba and Sindhi) are spoken by about 20 million each. Iceland isn't even close to making the top-50 list. Mandarin Chinese is number 1, English is number 2, Spanish is number 3 and Arabic is number 4. German is 10 and French is number 14. It's really rather humbling to see how many people speak some of the languages that most of us would consider obscure. The wikipedia ranks the language in a slightly different way, but if you keep scrolling...and scrolling, and scrolling, you can find where Iceland falls in the greater scheme of things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers Mic, there are over twice as many native-Welsh speaking people as native Icelandic speakers. Karen Thomas, NC
