Icelandic orthography

The modern Icelandic alphabet developed from a standard established in the 19th century (primarily by Danish linguist Rasmus Rask). It is ultimately based heavily on an orthographic standard created in the early 12th century by a document referred to as The First Grammatical Treatise, author unknown. The standard was intended for the common North Germanic language Old Norse. It did not have much influence, however, at the time. The most defining characteristics of the alphabet were established in the old treatise: • Use of the acute accent (originally to signify vowel length). • Use of , also used in the Old English alphabet as the letter thorn. The later Rasmus Rask standard was a re-enactment of the old treatise, with some changes to fit concurrent North Germanic conventions, such as the exclusive use of rather than . Various old features, like , had not seen much use in the later centuries, so Rask's standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th-century changes are most notably the adoption of , which had previously been written as (reflecting the modern pronunciation), and the replacement of with in 1973. == Spelling-to-sound correspondence ==

This section lists Icelandic letters and letter combinations and their phonemic representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Vowels Icelandic vowels may be either long or short, but this distinction is only relevant in stressed syllables: unstressed vowels are neutral in quantitative aspect. The vowel length is determined by the consonants that follow the vowel: if there is only one consonant before another vowel or at the end of the word (i.e., CVCV or CVC# syllable structure), the vowel is long; if there are more than one (CVCCV), counting geminates and pre-aspirated stops as CC, the vowel is short. There are, however, some exceptions to this rule: • A vowel is long when the first consonant following it is and the second , e.g. , , , , . • A vowel is usually kept long in one syllable morphemes or words ending in ; notably in: • Compounds, e.g. . • Though the morpheme boundary may be blurred and words such as and its derivatives have both variants. The usage is also indecise for the non-compound verbs and . • Word + preposition sequences, e.g. . • Genitives, e.g. . • Alternatively influenced by the s, e.g. , , (alongside , , ). } Consonants } "combed " : unaspirated voiceless bilabial stop : : unaspirated voiceless dental stop : voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative : voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative : : : : : : unaspirated voiceless velar stop : unaspirated voiceless palatal stop : voiced velar fricative : voiceless velar fricative : palatal approximant : : : aspirated voiceless palatal stop : : unaspirated voiceless palatal stop : : voiceless velar fricative : aspirated voiceless palatal stop : unaspirated voiceless palatal stop : voiceless alveolar lateral approximant : : : : : : : : : , : : : : aspirated voiceless bilabial stop : unaspirated voiceless bilabial stop : voiceless labiodental fricative : : (voiced alveolar trill or tap) : (voiceless alveolar trill or tap) : , mostly : , mostly : : : : aspirated voiceless dental stop : : unaspirated voiceless dental stop == Code pages ==

The alphabet is included in Unicode, in code page 861. Historically, Icelandic text was supported by ISO 8859-1, followed by Windows-1252, which added various characters unrelated to Icelandic. ISO 8859-15 also includes support for Icelandic characters. == See also ==