English has become entrenched as the de facto second official language of Iceland. It's a very depressing trend for the conservation of Icelandic, and the ongoing promotion of English will only continue to exacerbate its decline.
I remember in the 80s when the Nordic TeX Users Group was formed, they did all of their official communications in English so as not to privilege any of the national languages of their membership.
Similarly, English is a standard language in India in part because of the linguistic diversity of the country¹ and being an outsider language means that communications in English don’t privilege any of the indigenous ethnic groups, although it seems that English usage has been dropping in favor of English.
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1. English usage was supposed to have been phased out fifteen years after independence, but the mandated sunset was changed by constitutional amendment in 1963 (apparently a year after the sunset date(!)). India has 22 scheduled languages—i.e., languages receiving constitutional recognition and encouragement—but there are 122 major languages with more than 10,000 speakers. I think India wins the prize for the greatest linguistic diversity among the nations of the world.
Just to be clear, I do see the value in a group like the Nordic TeX Users Group choosing a neutral language for simplicity and fairness. However, it's quite different when a whole nation adopts a new language just because it's the easy option, without considering the repercussions.
This crutch of using English in Iceland not only discourages (and actively prevents) newcomers from learning Icelandic, but it also creates a paradoxical reliance on a language that most immigrants do not speak prior to their arrival. This creates challenges, particularly hindering integration, as Icelandic is (for the time being) still required in most aspects of society. It also threatens the preservation of our language, which is only spoken by around three hundred thousand people.
If it were a matter of choosing another language, Polish might be a more natural choice, as Poles form the largest minority in the country.
But to answer the question, I personally lean towards discouraging English as the default second language and instead focus on strengthening Icelandic. Encouraging everyone to communicate in the native tongue, regardless of proficiency level, can be very effective. That was certainly my experience when my family and I moved to Catalonia.
Norskan er auðlesin, en ég á erfiðara með að skilja talmál!
Do you have any sources relating to the foreign family you mention, and of them securing landholding rights? Based on what I've found, the man that was burned wasn't rich (his family does appear to have become moderately well off by the time's standards at a later date, however).
I haven't found any mention of foreigners. The lawyer in the matter was Icelandic.
While not exactly the same, the concept of "whale drift" has existed in Icelandic law [1] for almost 8 centuries, and still applies today. It specifies to whom a whale carcass would belong to, depending on the situation, and so forth. The concept of "whale drift" also exists in the Icelandic language, and is used to point out an event as a stroke of great luck.
I'm a web & product development consultant based in Iceland. Specializing in web development, I work with startups of all sizes and help them build MVPs and full-fledged products. In order to help you build the best product, I make an effort to understand the needs of the company and the customer in equal measure, and I can help you innovate and design new features. I also help teams improve the architecture, performance, and tooling in existing projects. I tend to work with JavaScript, Node.js, React, and all the tooling around these technologies, but I'm flexible in that regard and have experience with many of the major frameworks and languages.
I'm currently evaluating and looking for clients for the second quarter of 2019 and onwards.
It appears that the system font was changed. I'm trying to figure out what it is now, it appears that San Francisco isn't even installed on my system anymore. GitHub, Twitter, and other sites using system-ui / -apple-system as the font-family now look very odd.
No, it's very much still San Francisco. Are you sure it's not a browser plugin issue, or perhaps something changed in Catalina that causes the browser not to display the font the same way as in previous versions?
If you're using Chrome, this may be the result of a bug in Chrome. Have a look in Safari, it should be fine there.
What you linked is "CSS-in-JS" (in the sense that the library/framework you use transforms the output for you, for convenience, i.e., you're not writing BEM or whatever - same as in the original article). Vue scopes the styles by adding a data attribute.
I'm a web & product development consultant based in Iceland. Specializing in web development, I work with startups of all sizes and help them build MVPs and full-fledged products. In order to help you build the best product, I make an effort to understand the needs of the company and the customer in equal measure, and I can help you innovate and design new features. I also help teams improve the architecture, performance, and tooling in existing projects. I tend to work with JavaScript, Node.js, React, and all the tooling around these technologies, but I'm flexible in that regard and have experience with many of the major frameworks and languages.
I'm currently evaluating and looking for clients for the second quarter of 2019 and onwards.
I haven't seen any libraries using the new context API make use of the observedBits prop (currently called `unstable_observedBits`, as its not officially supported). There's a comment in this library's codebase that hints that it will be used in the future. I wrote a bit about this API bitmask-based API a few months ago while I was experimenting with it[1], so I'm curious about its current state and whether others have experimented with it or know about its future in general.
I actually referenced your blog post as a good overview of how to use the bitmask API, so thanks for writing it!
I also filed a React RFC to make the API a bit more flexible by allowing us to pass a `calculateChangedBits` function directly to a `Context.Provider` instance:
Sebastian Markbage replied in that RFC thread, and tbh the discussion seemed a bit odd. It seemed like he was discouraging me from trying to use the bitmask API, or trying to figure out why I might actually want to use it, when it seems like the entire reason it exists is exactly for something like React-Redux to leverage it for performance optimizations.
I had a few versions of react-copy-write working with `unstable_observedBits` but I couldn't decide on the right optimization strategy. At this point I'm not sure how likely it is that this API will be released as stable, so I'm going to hold off until thats more clear.
