Icelandic Heritage in North America

The editors of this work of collected essays note that because Iceland is a small country, Icelanders often prefer to judge themselves by per capita figures, rather than gross figures. On a per capita basis, there may be more written on Icelandic immigrants in North America than any other North American ethnic group. Only fifteen to sixteen thousand people migrated from Iceland in the period 1870 to 1914, but that comprised 20 percent of the island's total population. Most of the contributors to this book are from Iceland, and most of the contributions were originally written in Icelandic before translation into flawless English. For a country that small to produce so much high-quality scholarship on this topic is quite remarkable.The introduction summarizes the basic contours of the historical migration and settlement patterns of the Icelanders in North America. The largest concentration of Icelanders was in Manitoba, specifically in New Iceland, although Winnipeg became their urban center. In a story that scholars of other ethnic groups will recognize, migration from Iceland was essentially cut off during World War I, and never recovered. Yet, it was perhaps the concentration of Icelander settlements that helped the group maintain their language and love for their culture. In 1951, they were able to support the formation of an Icelandic Chair at the University of Manitoba. This position continues to this day.The book's title suggests that this is primarily a work about heritage, but in fact, heritage seems to be of secondary importance here to language. The impetus for the book was the Heritage Language Project, an Icelandic government–supported research project in the 2010s to document the state of the Icelandic language in North America. For this project, linguists tested the Icelandic skills of mostly elderly North American Icelandic (NAI) speakers. Chapters 1 and 2 combine linguistics and history, and chapters 3 through 10 are largely historical in nature, although they tend to concern editors, writers, and people with close connections to the development of NAI. Chapters 11 through 15 investigate linguistics themes. In a way, this book is a follow-up to co-editor Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir's 2006 work North American Icelandic: The Life of a Language. That book, based on a dissertation from 1990, provided a more general overview of the history and development of Icelandic speech patterns in North America.The opening chapter of this new collection describes the history of the Icelandic language in migration. Language in nineteenth-century Iceland was not uniform and was influenced by Danish and other loan words. North American Icelandic became the only dialect of Icelandic outside of Iceland. It was influenced by the origin of many migrants from the Northeast of Iceland. In North America, Icelanders generally promoted bilingualism for the first two generations. The authors give almost no credit here to the efforts of any religious body, which is curious, considering the strong role churches and synagogues have played in preserving language elsewhere in North American ethnic history. Language conservation appears to have been the prerogative of families, social groups, and an active community press.The Icelanders in Canada and the United States invented the term “Vestur-Íslendingur,” “Western Icelanders” to define themselves. This concept helped to keep members in the fold, but it was also exclusionary, as it was often used to define Protestant Icelanders against Catholic ones. The authors could have mentioned a similar Swedish concept, “Vesterheimen” or “the Western home,” which helped to define Swedish American geographical space and identity.Icelanders in North America preserved some archaic words and adopted many American loan words, although some words that people suggest they adopted in an American context had already been part of their vocabulary in Iceland. Lexical borrowings included words like “train,” “corn,” and “tent,” which had no equivalent in Iceland. North American Icelandic also uses the progressive past verb tense more commonly than other alternatives. The authors suggest that while Icelandic in the twentieth century became used in more domains such as computers and technology, North American Icelandic gradually became used in fewer domains, until it was only primarily spoken in the house with family. This limited North American Icelandic speakers from discussing in Icelandic some topics that people in Iceland today would find perfectly natural and easy to discuss.The audience for American migration and ethnic history generally consists of a range of people, from casual readers interested in their own heritage, to professional scholars eager to debate finer historiographical points. It can be difficult to write a work that appeals to both kinds. Although there is plenty to praise here, this book is not without its faults. It tends to both overshoot and undershoot its audiences. The chapters on linguistics are well-written and insightful but too technical for most general readers and academic historians, who would require definitions for terms like “phylogenetic statistical models” and “proprioception” (p. 228). Meanwhile, the historical chapters tend to be quite narrow and lack the context and comparisons that would make them useful to scholars of comparative race, ethnicity, and migration history. Readers who are primarily interested in (their own) Icelandic heritage will welcome the introduction most of all, but will perhaps be disappointed with the mixed quality and type of the later chapters.

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