Canada's Icelandic Speakers?

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SOURCES & FURTHER READING

[NameExplain]

Anyone watching from new Iceland? Or Old Iceland for that matter.

[alihammington]

I grew up near Gimli. An Icelandic friend once showed me a letter written by his great-grandfather in Gimli to family back home. In the letter, the man marvelled at the forests ("There are so many trees here, they BURN WOOD to keep warm!"). He was astonished that anyone would actually burn a tree.

[ycylchgames]

This reminds me of the tiny Scottish village in Italy made up of lost Scottish mercenaries. Stuff like this is fascinating.

[andrewmazzarini]

Gimli is also notable for being the site of an Air Canada flight (if I remember correctly it was Flight 143) that ran out of fuel due to a miscalculation and safely landed on the runway of an old military base that was converted into a drag strip. That Boeing 767 in particular earned the nickname "Gimli Glider" because of the pilot's actions

[mjr_schneider]

I live just south of Gimli and I’ve never heard anyone speaking Icelandic there unfortunately. They do however have a lot of cool Icelandic last names (all ending in son) and the Icelandic festival is very popular. Like most other older Canadian immigrant groups, it’s mostly become a symbolic ethnicity.

[hupvi]

I'm native Icelandic and I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I learned about Gimli and morefrom this video! Þökk fyrir það! 🇮🇸🇮🇸

[gerardacronin]

I lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba for many years and have visited Gimli and Hecla. Last summer I visited Iceland. At Isafjordur I met a tour guide, a young lady whose accent seemed very familiar. She was Icelandic, but had spent most of her childhood in Winnipeg, and was back in Iceland working as a tour guide during the University holidays!

[SolviKaaber]

This video has an incredible timing. My best friend just came back to Iceland from Canada, he was on a program called Snorri West, which invites Icelanders to come to Canada and the U.S. to visit "West Icelandic" settlements. There are so many places Icelanders settled that they visit different places each year, this summer they went to Canada to Calgary, Edmonton and Markerville in Alberta and also Vatnabyggð and Mt Hecla (like the Hekla volcano) and other places in Saskatchewan. They were also supposed to go to Spanish Fork in Utah but because of strikes in the airline companies they couldn't.

Even though some folks have Icelandic roots in these places, very few can actually speak Icelandic.

The West Icelanders have a similar genealogical database to "Íslendingabók" which Iceland has. Very extensive records of the lineage of every Icelander going back centuries. My friend found some people related to him only in the third and fourth generation living in North America.


Oh and lastly again, please try slightly more when you pronounce Icelandic words and names, I know they're difficult but it only takes a couple of tries.

[ChaoticRabbitOfCaerbannog]

Born and raised Manitoban here, the Icelandic room at the Scandinavian Cultural Centre in Winnipeg is interesting (but you can only access it during certain events, like Folklorama (the largest multicultural festival in the world)). The festival in Gimli is fun, I couldn’t go the past few years, I dance in Folklorama (this will be my tenth year, actually) and the last couple years it overlapped with it so I couldn’t go. My great grandma came to Canada from Iceland. There aren’t very many speakers, but I know a few people who are fluent. I know a few words, but I am no where near fluent, the University of Manitoba has a department dedicated to Icelandic, and Winnipeg has a smaller Icelandic newspaper. We have the Snorri Program which lets people go over to Iceland for a bit. I did the math one night and figured out my family is roughly 1% of the whole Icelandic Canadian population and a little less than 2% of the Manitoban Icelandic Canadian population

[tianming]

Based on the 2021 Canadian census there are only 30 people left who speak Icelandic as their mother tongue in Gimli, and around 250 in Manitoba as a whole. However there are 600 people of Icelandic descent in the town (1/3 of the population) and over 30k in all of Manitoba.

[herschelwright]

I’ve visited Gimli once and I also visited the Icelandic village on Hecla Island which is on Lake Winnipeg.

[ryuuguu]

There is a Department of Icelandic Language and Literature at the University of Manitoba. So there are people who still read and write the language. My friend's thesis was on the representation of wealth in Icelandic Sagas. Also, there was Baldur Stephensson, born in Manitoba who received both the Order of Canada and Order of the Falcon from Iceland in 2000, So the connection is still there. In the 1980s ( when I last lived in Manitoba) I would still meet people with Iclendic sur names like Olasdaughter who had recently immigrated to Canada.

[mrfrog]

Góðan daginn! Ég bý í Québec-fylki og er að læra íslensku. Mér finnst þetta tungumál er alveg frábært.

Ég hafði líka gaman af þessu myndbandi. Takk! 🇮🇸

[theresemalmberg]

I have a cookbook called "The Culinary Saga of New Iceland" which tells the story of these settlers and what they ate.

[geekie]

As a Canadian living in Saskatchewan I am aware of Gimli MB. Never knew about the Icelandic twist though! Thanks for a really neat video!

[Solomon]

I went to a trade school at Winnipeg. And I tell you, Icelandics are some serious good looking people.They rarely marry anyone outside of their community though (That's what my Icelandic classmate told me).

[Aboz]

North Dakota has Icelandic State Park, right on the border about a 3 hour drive from Gimli.

[corinna]

There's also an area in Manitoba called "New Finland".

[jersd]

The best part of this is that the "RM" which is like county in America and UK. Is called BYFROST! So cool

[tannerjohnson]

I’m from Arborg in new Iceland and it’s great to see my unique Icelandic heritage get its story told!