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From https://www.ozy.com/provocateurs/iceland-fights-to-protect-its-native-tongue-from-siri/87742

Iceland Fights to Protect Its Native Tongue from Siri 
Armed with technology and determination, Icelandic warriors will protect their language at all costs.
by Fiona Zublin

Increased concerns that Icelandic will fall into decline have brought both government intervention and money: Last year, the Icelandic government allocated funding for the institute to develop language technologies in Icelandic, so islanders can enjoy Siri, Alexa, GPS and any other talking robots in their native language. The project, set to kick off later this year, will focus on speech synthesis and speech recognition in Icelandic, as well as open-source machine learning systems geared toward the language. It’s a heavier lift with Icelandic than with, say, French, because there are fewer texts to work from, meaning linguistic research databases known as corpora simply can’t achieve the same volume.

...While France’s Académie Française organizes French translations of foreign phrases and words that creep into the lexicon, Iceland has no such authorized body, instead making do with loose coalitions by industry that meet to determine new Icelandic terms for the medical community, legal community and so on. The closest to an organized national body is the Icelandic Language Council, of which Kristinsson is a member, which convenes annually to issue a resolution on the status of Icelandic and choose a theme to emphasize — last year it was the paucity of children’s literature written in Icelandic, viewed as a major problem for keeping children interested in their native language.

Read the full article at https://www.ozy.com/provocateurs/iceland-fights-to-protect-its-native-tongue-from-siri/87742

The article includes a link to a podcast episode from I Heart Reykjavik. Tune into more Icelandic language podcasts here: https://iheartreykjavik.net/tag/podcast/

The I Heart Reykjavik blog is also a good source for travel and cultural information: https://iheartreykjavik.net/the-blog/