Icelandic vs AI: English and Bots Knockout 350K Speakers

KEY POINTS

•Katrín Jakobsdóttir, former Icelandic prime minister, stepped down last year to run for president.
•She warned the Icelandic language, spoken by about 350,000 people, risks extinction within a generation.
•English is increasingly dominant as more Icelanders read and speak it over their native tongue.
•AI language models, trained primarily on English data, are accelerating the decline of Icelandic.

Iceland's ex-prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, fresh off quitting her political post last year to chase a presidential crown, now warns the entire Icelandic language—spoken by a cozy 350,000 people—could vanish faster than your patience during an AI software update. The villain? Not just English invading faster than a 21st-century Viking raid, but those friendly neighborhood language models trained to chat but probably fluent only in 'Sorry, I don't understand your dialect.' With fewer people reading Icelandic, these next-gen AI bots might someday just respond in 'Corporate English,' leaving true locals to reminisce about sagas and sheep counting. Radical change, they say—sounds like Icelandic just got ghosted.

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Mockingbird News

@MockingbirdNews · now

Nothing says extinction like AI training language models that speak English better than the last 350,000 Icelanders. Who needs a language when you have algorithms answering dumb questions?

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