Saturday 15/November/2025 – 01:57 PM
Former Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir has warned that the Icelandic language could disappear within a generation due to the widespread use of artificial intelligence and the dominance of English-language media.
Jakobsdottir, who stepped down last year to run for president after seven years in power, said Iceland is witnessing radical changes in language use, with the number of English speakers rising and Icelandic reading declining, a trend exacerbated by the way artificial intelligence models are trained.
Her statements came before her participation in the Iceland Noir Police Novel Festival in Reykjavik, following the publication of her second novel in this literary genre, which she co-authored with writer Ragnar Jonasson. She said: “Many languages disappear, and with them many human values and ideas die.” She added that the Icelandic language, which is spoken by only about 350,000 people, is considered one of the least changed languages in the world, which places a great responsibility on the people of Iceland to preserve it.
The threat of artificial intelligence to the future of language
Jakobsdottir noted that young people in the country are surrounded by English-language content on social media and other media, stressing that efforts to preserve the language are still insufficient.
She stressed that the previous government was aware of the dangers that artificial intelligence might pose, and the importance of using Icelandic texts and books to train it. She also pointed to the recent initiative of the Ministry of Education in Iceland, which has collaborated with Anthropic on a national trial of using AI in education, which is providing AI tools to hundreds of teachers across the country.
