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Concept
Icelandic grammar
Summary
Icelandic is an inflected language. Icelandic nouns can have one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in four cases and two numbers, singular and plural.
Icelandic morphology is prototypical of Germanic/Indo-European languages. Nouns are declined for case, number, definiteness and gender; adjectives for case, number, gender and definiteness (i.e. weak and strong).
Icelandic possesses only the definite article, which can stand on its own or be attached to its modified noun. Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, number and voice. There are three voices: active, passive and medial. There are only two simple tenses, past and present, along with a number of auxiliary constructions, some of which may be regarded as tenses, others as aspects.
Strong noun and weak noun
Icelandic nouns are declined in four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. They belong to three main noun classes (masculine, feminine, neuter) and can be inflected for number (singular, plural) and definiteness (definite, indefinite). There are two main declension paradigms for nouns from all noun classes: strong (i.e. root ending in consonant) and weak nouns (root ending in a vowel), which are further divided in smaller groups for declension, according to many criteria (sound-shifts, consonant clusters, etc.) The following table shows four examples of strong declension.
The gender of a noun can often be surmised by looking at the ending of the word:
Masculine nouns—often end in -ur, -i, -ll, or -nn.
Feminine nouns—often end in -a, -ing, or -un.
Neuter nouns usually have no ending or have a final accented vowel.
Icelandic does not have an indefinite article (a/an in English), and the definite article (the in English) is usually joined to the end of the word. The table below shows the different suffix forms for the three genders in the nominative. This list is not exhaustive, and there are numerous exceptions in every case.
Official source
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