1Right, everyone, let's make a start.
2Over the past few sessions,
3we've been considering the reasons why some world languages are in decline,
4and today I'm going to introduce another factor that affects languages,
5and the speakers of those languages,
6and that's technology, and, in particular, digital technology.
7In order to illustrate its effect,
8I'm going to focus on the Icelandic language,
9which is spoken by around 321,000 people,
10most of whom live in Iceland - an island in the North Atlantic Ocean.
11The problem for this language is not the number of speakers,
12even though this number is small.
13Nor is it about losing words to other languages, such as English.
14In fact, the vocabulary of Icelandic is continually increasing
15because when speakers need a new word for something,
16they tend to create one, rather than borrowing from another language.
17All this makes Icelandic quite a special language,
18it's changed very little in the past millennium,
19yet it can handle twenty-first-century concepts related to the use of computers and digital technology.
20Take, for example, the word for web browser...
21this is vafri in Icelandic,
22which comes from the verb 'to wander'.
23I can't think of a more appropriate term because that's exactly what you do mentally when you browse the internet.
24Then there's an Icelandic word for podcast,
25which is too hard to pronounce!
26And so on.
27Icelandic, then, is alive and growing, but - and it's a big but,
28young Icelanders spend a great deal of time in the digital world
29and this world is predominantly English.
30Think about smartphones.
31They didn't even exist until comparatively recently,
32but today young people use them all the time to read books, watch TV or films,
33play games, listen to music, and so on.
34Obviously, this is a good thing in many respects because it promotes their bilingual skills,
35but the extent of the influence of English in the virtual world is staggering
36and it's all happening really fast.
37For their parents and grandparents,
38the change is less concerning because they already have their native-speaker skills in Icelandic.
39But for young speakers -
40well, the outcome is a little troubling.
41For example, teachers have found that playground conversations in Icelandic secondary schools
42can be conducted entirely in English,
43while teachers of much younger children have reported situations
44where their classes find it easier to say what is in a picture using English, rather than Icelandic.
45The very real and worrying consequence of all this
46is that the young generation in Iceland is at risk of losing its mother tongue.
47Of course, this is happening to other European languages too,
48but while internet companies might be willing to offer, say, French options in their systems,
49it's much harder for them to justify the expense of doing the same for a language
50that has a population the size of a French town, such as Nice.
51The other drawback of Icelandic is the grammar,
52which is significantly more complex than in most languages.
53At the moment, the tech giants are simply not interested in tackling this.
54So, what is the Icelandic government doing about this?
55Well, large sums of money are being allocated to a language technology fund
56that it is hoped will lead to the development of Icelandic sourced apps
57and other social media and digital systems,
58but clearly this is going to be an uphill struggle.
59On the positive side,
60they know that Icelandic is still the official language of education and government.
61It has survived for well over a thousand years
62and the experts predict that its future in this nation state is sound and will continue to be so.
63However, there's no doubt that it's becoming an inevitable second choice in young people's lives.
64This raises important questions.
65When you consider how much of the past is tied up in a language,
66will young Icelanders lose their sense of their own identity?
67Another issue that concerns the government of Iceland is this.
68If children are learning two languages through different routes,
69neither of which they are fully fluent in,
70will they be able to express themselves properly?