The Icelandic language

Twenty endings that decode 41.5% of the map

Icelandic place-names are built like German compounds, with the generic feature last. So the ending tells you what kind of thing it is, and the beginning tells you whose it was or what it looked like. Learn the endings and a wall of consonants turns into a description.

We hold 4,861 distinct named places. 2,019 of them end in one of these twenty. The top eight alone cover 33% of everything — roughly a third of the Icelandic map, from eight words.

How that was counted, since the number is the point. matched on the name ENDING, ASCII-folded; counted once per distinct name, not per record; first match wins, so no name is counted twice; hikes/ and tours/ excluded — user-written titles are not place-names. One consequence worth naming: a campsite called “Tjaldsvæðið við Skógafoss” counts as -foss. That is not a leak in the method — the campsite is named after the waterfall beside it, which is precisely how Icelandic naming works.

The two letters that scare people

Icelandic kept two characters English threw away, and both are easier than they look.

• Þ / þ — thorn. The th in thing. Unvoiced, and it only ever starts a word. Þingvellir begins exactly like “thing” — which is what it means, the assembly plain.
• Ð / ð — eth. The th in father. Voiced, and it never starts a word. Goðafoss has it in the middle.
• The accented vowels are different letters, not stresses. á, é, í, ó, ú, ý and ö each have their own sound and their own place in the alphabet. Í is not a fancy i.
• ll is usually a soft “tl”. Which is why the end of Eyjafjallajökull sounds nothing like the way it is spelled to an English eye.

Why the names are so long, and why that helps

They are long because they are compounds, not because they are complicated. Break them at the joins and each piece is an ordinary word:

• Eyja·fjalla·jökull — islands’ · mountains’ · glacier. The glacier above the mountains that face the Westman Islands.
• Kirkju·bæjar·klaustur — church · farm · cloister. Named for the convent that stood there, and now the only shop for a long stretch of the south coast.
• Kolbeins·staða·hreppur — Kolbeinn’s · farmstead · district. The sign at the top of this page.
• Jökuls·ár·lón — glacier · river · lagoon. Three words, and a complete description of what you are looking at.

This is the whole trick. Nobody expects you to pronounce them and nobody will correct you if you try. But once you can see the joins, a road sign stops being noise and starts telling you whether there is a waterfall, a glacier or a bay at the end of the road.