I’m going to talk to you about language. Your language.

Imagine speaking a mother tongue that you cannot use anywhere outside your own country – that’s not so hard to imagine, is it? Icelanders are quite used to this, as are the Finns, and the Latvians – and in fact, a great majority of the Earth’s 7.6 billion inhabitants. Then imagine speaking a mother tongue that you cannot use everywhere within your own country – that shouldn’t be so hard either. This is for instance the everyday experience of speakers of minority languages, such as those who have Irish or Welsh or Breton or Basque as their first language. But finally, try to imagine speaking a mother tongue that you cannot even use in all communication within your own walls. That could be at bit distressing and confusing, don’t you think?

This might, however, soon be the reality for speakers of many languages – not only small languages like Icelandic, but also languages with millions of speakers. The main reason is the imminent explosion in the use of voice control. Most of you have probably tried to use Siri in iPhones or some of the new digital assistants – Amazon Alexa, Google Home, or Microsoft Cortana. Did it work out for you? Could you talk with them in your mother tongue? I couldn’t.

YouTube has many videos showing people trying to use voice control – unsuccessfully, because they have Scottish accent, because they have just come from the dentist and their pronunciation is slurred, and so on. This is often rather funny at first, but it ceases to be funny when you realize that tomorrow, this will be your reality – everything around you will be voice controlled. Your cell phone, your computer, your car, your household appliances – you name it. What will that entail for speakers of small languages which are currently unusable within this new technology?

It has recently been claimed that at least 95% of the world’s six or seven thousand languages are awaiting so-called “digital death”. This means that these languages don’t keep up with the rapid developments in language and speech technology and will gradually disappear from the digital realm – or fail to enter that realm altogether. They will not be used on the Internet or in video games, and language technology tools and applications such as speech recognizers, translation systems and so on will not be developed for them.

Of course, this is only a prediction, not a fact, and things might turn out differently if the necessary measures are taken. Therefore, it is important to make efforts to ensure that Icelandic and other small and vulnerable languages escape digital death and enter the digital realm.

It is well known that speakers’ attitudes are among the key factors in determining the vitality of a language. If speakers generally foster negative attitude towards their language, it is doomed. The attitudes of young speakers are particularly important in this respect. Young people in Iceland, and probably in most Western countries at least, think more globally than their parents did. They see the whole world as their home, their stage, their playground, their market – they want to travel abroad, study abroad, work abroad, and live abroad.

These young people know from the outset that Icelandic is useless outside Iceland, and I think they can live with that. But if it turns out that they cannot use their language at home either – if Icelandic will be excluded from the digital world of the future, where these people want to find new and exciting job opportunities and entertainment, the effects on their attitudes towards Icelandic might be very negative and pave the way to the death of the language.

But there is more at stake here. We know that children in the language acquisition period – say up to six to nine years of age – need a certain amount of language input to acquire the language of the community and build their own solid internal grammar. With English dominating their digital world – on the Internet, in smartphones, in video games, on YouTube, and so on – chances are that the children’s exposure to spoken Icelandic will be considerably lessened, perhaps below the necessary threshold for complete language acquisition. Furthermore, their parents might be preoccupied with their smartphones instead of spending time talking with their children.

This might result in groups of children growing up without mother tongue competence in their native language. Nor in English for that matter, despite their great exposure to that language. Receptive input, like for instance watching TV, does not provide enough stimulus for successful first language acquisition. What is needed is interactive communication – conversation. We need to talk to our children, listen to them, and respond to them.

Now, you may ask: Why bother? Wouldn’t we be better off if we switched to English? Wouldn’t that make life easier for us and our children? What’s the point in clutching to a language with a limited usability and spending great amounts of time and money in keeping it alive and functioning? It is my firm belief that despite technical advances and globalization, our mother tongue – any mother tongue – is still invaluable to all of us. For a number of reasons.

Every language is a cultural treasure because it is unique in some way – its vocabulary, syntax, and sound system is unlike any other language, and the semantic nuances that it can express preserve the experience of generations which is different from that of other cultures and societies. A language that dies is lost forever. Even though we have extensive written texts and sound recordings, which is usually not the case, it is impossible to revitalize a dead language because complete acquisition is only possible by direct transmission from one speaker to another – from parents to children.

Every language is also important and unique from a scientific point of view because it can help us learn something about the nature of human language in general. Icelandic is for instance studied by a number of scholars all over the world and examples from Icelandic are used in teaching in many universities outside Iceland. Not because Icelandic is so special, but because its characteristics can contribute to the model of our language capacity that linguists are building.

Our language is also our link to the nation’s history and culture in the past. This is especially evident for Icelanders who enjoy the privilege of being able to read without great difficulties texts from the beginning of writing in Iceland 900 years ago. If Icelandic undergoes radical changes, or ceases to exist as a living language, we lose this direct connection with our past – not only the connection with our celebrated medieval literature, but also with modern texts from the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Language is of course also a social phenomenon – by far our most important tool of communication with other people. Therefore, it must not stagnate, but has to be vivid and adapt to the needs of the society at any given time. It must tolerate variation in pronunciation, inflections and syntax, and that new words enter the language and old words acquire new meaning. It must not become the private property of certain groups of people, and language, and variation in its use, must not be used to discriminate people or categorize them in any way.

Last but not least, language is the most important outlet for our feelings – love and joy, hatred and anger, sorrow and sadness, hopes and desires – but also our tool for creative and innovative thinking. A language that we acquire in childhood, our mother tongue, is an integral part of ourselves, our private property but at the same time public property belonging to the whole language community, and in a sense even to the whole mankind. Therefore, preserving our language – any language – is a matter of utmost importance.

In the light of what I’ve been saying in this talk, it may seem a bit ironic and paradoxical that I’m speaking English to you instead of my native Icelandic. You might ask whether I’ve joined forces with the enemy. But English is not the enemy. English is at present our most useful tool for transnational communication and outreach – although that may change in the future due to developments in speech technology and automatic translation. By giving this talk in English, I’m merely selecting the tool that best serves my needs to deliver my message. The battlefield where we fight for our languages lies within their respective language communities, not in international communication.

Our languages are not doomed to die – they can be saved, but we need a joint effort. The Icelandic government is for instance investing considerably in language technology, as many countries are doing, in order to make Icelandic digitally viable within the next five years and thus to spur positive attitudes towards the language among its speakers.

Now it’s up to all of us to raise awareness among parents and other adults about the importance of verbal communication for the survival of our languages. We must ensure that our children receive enough relevant input in their mother tongue in order for them to become proficient and confident language users. The future of our languages depends on our children’s possibilities to use them in all domains – and on their willingness to do so.