Canada's Icelandic Speakers?
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- Опубліковано 11 лип 2024
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SOURCES & FURTHER READING
The Settlement Of New Iceland: www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history...
Gimli: www.gimli.ca/p/new-iceland
The Icelandic Canadian Town: www.atlasobscura.com/articles...
Gimle: kids.britannica.com/students/...
Gimli LOTR Origin: tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Gimli
Gimli Getting Tim Hortons: www.winnipegfreepress.com/bus...
Anyone watching from new Iceland? Or Old Iceland for that matter.
A Viking man can impress women by demonstrating how he takes his longship up a canal to deliver seeds which can be planted in fertile places.
i live in Winnipeg, we have an Icelandic Studies program here
@@beepboop204 We bloody Yanks like our Canuck Viking neighbors. Now get in your Viking longship to raid for maple syrup and v-neck sweaters! Viva the holy movie Canadian Bacon! 🤪
-Dave the Bloody Yank
@@davea6314 we also had Voyageurs, canoe riding Francophones who paddled all around early Canada trapping and trading furs. we really are a big empty nature land ☺
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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.
Very few trees in Iceland. There's a joke in Iceland that goes; if you're lost in Iceland what should you do? Stand up.
I was about to say:
Prediction: Gimil, Manitoba. I can see the distillery from across the lake in Grand Beach.
Funny thing, growing up close to it, seems utterly normal.
Strong Tree Beard vibes from friend's great grandfather.
What would be the traditional way to keep warm in Iceland (I assume today central heating from gas or electricity so not that) I honestly can't think of a good way to keep warm in pre modern times besides burning wood! 😅
@@micahw83thermal springs, peat, whale oil…
This reminds me of the tiny Scottish village in Italy made up of lost Scottish mercenaries. Stuff like this is fascinating.
There is also a Confederate colony in Brazil.
@@DCMarvelMultiverseHow many slaves do they have?
@@DCMarvelMultiverse I was thinking exactly the same thing, then I opened the replies and there yours was!
@@Ggdivhjkjl None now, but the colony was indeed founded by U.S. Confederates when they realized they wouldn't be able to keep slaves in the U.S. anymore. Brazil still had slavery back then, and welcomed these people.
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
Second longest (debated) unpowered glide and safe landing of any commercial airliner, even to this day. Longest was an Air Transat Flight also registered in Canada
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.
I lived in Gimli many decades ago, when the military was still there. Almost all the Icelandic adults and teenagers could speak the language, then, although the teenagers rarely bothered when not at home. It's a shame to hear that nobody speaks it anymore.
Most of us relocated to bigger cities.
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.
I have a cookbook called "The Culinary Saga of New Iceland" which tells the story of these settlers and what they ate.
🤔...Added to my list of book to buy. Thanks.
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.
If you want a follow up from that video I definitely recommend reading about the Snorri West Program, they also have the Snorri Program which brings Americans and Canadians of Icelandic descent to visit Iceland. Here for example you can read about the different places this program goes to www.snorri.is/snorri-west-corridors.html
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.
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!
Gimli also makes Crown Royal
MANITOBA MENTIONED
MY EXACT THOUGHT LOL
OMG MANITOBA MENTIONED
I’ve visited Gimli once and I also visited the Icelandic village on Hecla Island which is on Lake Winnipeg.
You are missing a key fact here. The Icelanders that founded Gimli originally went to Kinmount Ontario, in 1874, where they worked on the railroad. After a very harsh winter and quite a few deaths, they packed up and went west and founded Gimli. I work daily with many Icelanders and when they come to visit, they visit the memorial, which is 5km from where I am currently sitting. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Settlement_Disaster_Memorial
North Dakota has Icelandic State Park, right on the border about a 3 hour drive from Gimli.
Yes if you don't account for the line at the border.
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
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!
The best part of this is that the "RM" which is like county in America and UK. Is called BYFROST! So cool
It's with an I. Municipality of Bifrost-Riverton
clearly you’re missing out on fun Manitoba town and RM names. Baldur is a pretty great one I can think of. Mystery Lake too
I am Canadian, a student of Canadian history, and I'd never heard if New Iceland. I had heard of Gimli, an I used to live in eastern Saskatchewan, so I am so shocked that I never knew this! Thsnk you for informing me!😅❤
Read Pierre Burton's the promised land. The Icelandic were exactly the people that Sr Clifford Sifton wanted to settle western Canada. He wanted poor northern European farmers because they would be happy for the opportunity and would be able to deal with the weather. Thats the same reason that east central sask has a large population with Ukrainian heritage
@@colinbodnaryk7518 thanks for the recommend. I wrote a paper on Ukrainian migration to Saskatchewan back in high school.
Selkirk is north of Winnipeg. It's not on Lake Manitoba. It's also Scottish, not Icelandic. You're confusing it with Lundar, which is Icelandic and on Lake Manitoba. Morden is a Mennonite town, not Icelandic at all.
It was very funny to me hearing him pronounce them like they’re Icelandic names
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! 🇮🇸
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.
I have some Icelandic coins that a customer paid me with thinking they were American coins
I am an eighth Icelandic. My dad is from Utah, and there were a large number of Icelanders who converted to Mormonism and settled in the town of Spanish Fork, Utah. My great great grandfather only spoke Icelandic is whole life, which proved a problem when my grandmother’s generation came around. They didn’t speak any Icelandic, so they couldn’t communicate with their own grandfather.
Edit: I realized after watching the video fully that you touched on the Icelanders of Utah. I can provide some insight. Icelandic is not widely spoken in the Icelandic communities today. They have fully assimilated once the immigrants themselves died, with their children being almost fully absorbed into American culture. There is however, still very much a mythos around our Icelandic heritage. Being Icelandic is very compelling simply due to how rare it is. There is a monument to the Icelandic immigrants to Spanish Fork, and the stories of the Icelandic immigrants still very much lives on. For example, there is a very prolific legend about my 4th great grandmother, Gudny Erasmunson, who came to Utah with a handcart in her mid-70’s. This legend is so prolific that many of my family members have been given the middle name Gudny, including my niece and cousin, and I’ve heard that people on entirely different branches of the family have told it as well!
In southeast Saskatchewan there are also a few Icelandic settlements. Most of them were much older and more prominent in the past, but still cool none the less.
There's also an area in Manitoba called "New Finland".
you have mistaken the location of Lunder and Selkirk to each other on 4:34 .
They should teach Icelandic in the schools there just saying, otherwise its just going to become another Anglo settlement with a interesting past
It looks like it already is.
@@xyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyz I mean there is a difference between doing a quick lesson at a school to learning it at school as the primary language
As a example I learned a bit of Danish in school as a kid during our "Nordiska språk" lessons but its not like we actually learned to speak it, was like month a year in higher grade that we learned a few facts and phrases (nothing stuck), but lets say the school was primarily focused on Danish we would have been fully fluid at adulthood
There is a Department of Icelandic Language and Literature at the University of Manitoba.
@@xyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyzYes. Source: Dude who has visited it. Also Gimli is a huge summer tourist spot now. It’s got a year round community that is very different from its summer community.
@@kjyost like my homeland
We speak a norweagian dialect (in Sweden) but in the summer we get eneromous amounts of swedes (mostly wealthy ones) just flooding in everywhere
I guess that makes Manchester Canadian. They have a Tim Horton's
I’m from Arborg in new Iceland and it’s great to see my unique Icelandic heritage get its story told!
They wanted isolation but looking at Google maps now it doesn't look isolated anymore. There are like 20 settlements nearby in an area as big as my city. But they definitely did do a ton of farming. You could see the deforestation and square farms on satellite map
There were many other smaller Icelandic settlements in Canada, including Tindastoll (Markerville) in Alberta. The town was home to Icelandic poet Stephan G. Stephansson, who has been called "The Greatest Poet of the Western World.” Stephansson’s influence outside of Iceland was limited as he wrote solely in Icelandic. However, most of his works have been translated and are available. His homestead near Markerville is now a Provincial Historic Site that people can visit during the summer months.
While Norwegian is no longer widely spoken there and its not the only Norwegian settlement in the country, the Norwegian settlement in Bella Coola, BC has some interesting history in my opinion
You could watch 'Tales from the Gimli Hospital' if you can take weird expressionist film visions of the little town. It's something else, but super fun.
0:36
HOLD ON!
wait.
There's a Clas Ohlson in Reading? That's outside Sweden.
My mind is blown!
I remember when they literally only had one store. One. They had a great mailorder catalog though.
I've met a handful of these so-called 'West-Icelanders' (descendants of Icelanders who migrated to North America). They sometimes travel to Iceland in order to get in touch with the land from which their ancestors came from.
gimli also has a harbour with a sea wall
Hello, from the Narol postal town in Manitoba. I'm not too sure about the Icelandic language, but I think new Canadians who mostly arrived pre-WWI like my great-grandparents didn't pass on fluency in their heritage language to their grandchildren. My paternal great-grandparents came from Austrian Galicia where they spoke a dialect that was either Ukrainian and Polish. By the 1950s my father spoke English exclusively with a limited number of basic Ukrainian phrases. My brothers and I have even less Ukrainian knowledge than my Dad.
Gimli is famous for the Gimli glider, a 767 that ran out of fuel and landed at a former air base being used as a drag strip near Gimli.
My Aunt's doctor was from New Iceland and she was very Icelandic
I’m from Ontario and genuinely want to move to gimli so bad
Selkirk and Lundar are flipped up. 4:30
You should check out Mt Aragorn British Columbia and the surrounding mountains! I think you'll enjoy it! :)
Wait until the hear about the Portuguese in Luxembourg
It's specifically European Portuguese not Brazilian Portuguese in Luxembourg so it is clearly an EU/Schengen Area thing. If it was Brazilian Portuguese then it be more surprising.
What is surprising is the disproportionate amount, given how small both countries are
@@pedromenchik1961 It also amazes me that for the Portuguese to live there, they have to speak Letzeburgish, French, German (and English if doing tourism work) on top of their Portuguese!
I know the Netherlands was ruled by Spain for awhile. Could there have been something similar with Luxembourg and Portugal? Portugal was colonialist, after all. That would explain the language thing.
My grandma's dad was one of these people
Great video!!
I think you may have made a mistake though about the other Icelandic settlements. Lundar and Selkirk should be switched. Lundar is located near Lake Manitoba on the west side of what we call the Interlake Region.
Selkirk was a Scottish settlement started by Lord Selkirk. Though I'd bet many Icelanders may have moved there. I didn't know about Morden being Icelandic. I thought that was Mennonite like much of southern Manitoba.
The entire Interlake region is very Icelandic with Eriksdale north of Lundar, Arborg in the middle. And two of the Municipalities (like counties) in the area are called Gimli, and Bifrost-Riverton.
I delivered to a farmer near the Narrows names Thor Thorson😂
The Prime Minister or Iceland has been to Gimli's Icelandic festival.
And the great Canadian whiskey Crown Royal is made right near there.
I'm not in new Iceland, but met my partner in Gimli, and spent a lot of time there in the 80s and 90s. Only visit occasionally now though. The population doubles in the summer, as the lake is a very popular spot for Winnipegers to weekend. There's quite a bit of fishing tourism in the area as well, which is to say that as one of the seasonal population of the town, it's tough to get a real feel for how the population skews.
I think that Selkirk is a Scottish name from back in Empire days, though there are undoubtedly some of Icelandic heritage that call it home.
On the map in the video you flipped the location Selkirk and Lundar.
If you’re trying to find other Icelandic or Norse names, north of Gimli there is Hecla Island part of the Bifrost-Riverton municipality. I assume the island is named after Iceland’s Hekla volcano.
As a Canadian, I find it strange that you don't mention the two things that spring to mind when someone mentions Gimli. One is the famous Gimli Glider near-miraculous airline flight and the other is the Crown Royal distillery where they currently store 1.5 million barrels of aging whisky.
I expect that a large attraction of Gimli to Icelanders was the huge Lake Winnipeg. There have been commercial fisheries there since the 1890s. Iceland never produced a huge number of farmers but it is famous for its fishermen.
I just had a look at the Canada Census (2021) stats. I was surprised to discover that in Manitoba only 680 people reported speaking any Scandinavian language at home. That is less than the number reported to speak Kurdish or Swahili.
I live in Manitoba, the Iceland heritage is pretty neat! (Although I do not personally share this ancestry.) I am a hockey referee and the teams from the Icelandic area are the dirtiest teams in the province, it's probably the Viking background.
I’m a born and raised Manitoban. My good friend was half-Icelandic. It’s true about the community, I am unsure if Icelandic is spoken anywhere in the community.
As far as I understand, the language did "die" when an Icelandic person married an English person... it was just easier to speak english as everyone learned english and the icelandic just stopped being used. It is happening a lot here in Iceland.
I've been to Gimli many times, it's just English these days, Icelandic is no longer prevalent. Also, while Lunar was settled by Icelanders, Selkirk was settled by the Red River Company ( probably Brits) and named after a Scotsman. While Morden is nowhere near the region of New Iceland and was likely settled by Mennonites and Frenchies.
Lots of Manitobans have already commented that there isn’t really much Icelandic here anymore, but no one’s elaborated why - so here’s what I know:
1. Icelandic has historically been banned in the region’s schools, students would be punished for speaking it
2. Aside from Gimli, the rest of the former New Iceland colony doesn’t have the population it used to. Lots have moved away due to the decline of Lake Winnipeg’s fishing industry (see en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Winnipeg_algae_threat)
So, these two things combined, Icelandic is actually quite an endangered language in this province
Will you ever do a video talking in detail about turkic languages?
Yes my favorite is uyghur it's the only one that still uses Arabic script
1:49, interesting
Canada even has its own dialect of gaelic in nova scotia. Mainly on cape breton island.
Imagine if somebody is watching this in the Iceland supermarket carpark
If you're interested in obscure outposts of language, you'd have a field trip when researching the history"Unserdeutsch" a german creole language in Papua New Guniea
Land-uh... language-uh... fascinating-uh... two-uh... them-uh. What's the deal with the superfluous endings to words at the ends of sentences-uh? It grates on this neuro-spicy brain like fingernails on a chalkboard-uh.
as a Scot I find it funny that you put on a sort of icelandic accent when pronouncing "Selkirk," It's clearly named after the place in Scotland and has no relation to anything icelandic except for maybe if they share the word "kirk" for church.
Selkirk does have a large Icelandic population though, as it is the southern edge of said settlement.
@@oilersridersbluejaysyes, I never said otherwise. I just said that the name is not Icelandic and shouldn't be pronounced like that.
0:32 - Reading is a town.
I knew this as I watch Map Men
I'm not surprised, our far north is just as isolated and probably geographically and climatically similar.
Starting mid-19th century, Brazil started a policy of "whitenization" (yes, racism at its best) where migration from Europe was fostered to replace the African slaves that were slowly being phased out (slavery only ended for good in 1888). Italians and Germans are the biggest group and you can still find cities where Italian and German are their primary language in the South of Brazil (although WW2 meant this was supressed for several years and in some of these places, the tradition was lost with the baby boomer generation). There are other pockets of Europeans from cold countries tried to settle. I can think of Swiss and Finns in the mountainous regions of the state of Rio de Janeiro (not the city itself). I wasn't aware Icelanders were too. Cool to learn that.
How many languages Canada has the second most amount of people beside the source country?
?? i think its French but i didnt understand your question.
French, Punjabi and Icelandic, maybe a few more.
I met one of these guys once
I do hope that is their flag! A Canadian flag but with the map of Iceland instead of the maple leaf :)
The most common flag I see is the Icelandic flag with the right half of the maple leaf on the right side of the cross
You mentioned around 8:30 that Icelandic would have been the key language of the land... Indigenous languages would still be key to the region. You can't forget there is no "empty" land in Canada; it was all part of the Indigenous communities' traditional territories. They would hunt, fish, and travel the lands and waters; they still do.
The Gimli area at the time would have heard Michif, Saulteaux, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Lakota lands. French fur traders had also been in the area for a long time, so you would have had French as well (hence Michif), and English likely wouldn't be a rare language to use in the Gimili area either.
Nothing says "we have no connection to our ancestry other than the name of the place" more than a giant horned helmet statue in Greco-Roman style with Greco-Roman beauty ideals.
I don't think you will find a single icelandic speaker there, bro.
Edit: Also; about 7 % of Icelandic citizens currently live in mainland Scandinavia (mostly Norway and Denmark). They speak icelandic and have icelandic citizenship. Plus, there are numerous second generation Icelanders. This is unlike the Canadian Icelanders who are merely 4th or 5th generation descendants of emigrants.
Canada is still huge and sparse, but everyone insists on crowding into the same handful of urban areas, giving us insanely high house prices for so much land.
I've been to gimli
I once met an Icelandic fellow who told me he travelled to Gimli and noticed that the younger members of the Icelandic community did not speak Icelandic, which is not surprising because there is disapproval in Western Canada about speaking any language other than English.
"Iceland was very cold" lol. Not as cold as Manitoba.
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Happy birthday 🎊🎂🎁🎉🎈
Nordics will settle anywhere. Look around, we have!
A round of applause for the Icelandic people who found Vinland
So, the icelandic settlers wanted their new land to be as much like Iceland as possible while being nothing like it, except from the isolation? Got it!
Wait, is kanaydia a real place? Ive heard of it but I always pictured it like Narnia, or Oz, with maybe, like, a bunch of gnomes running around or something.
Next video: Argentina’s German speakers?
🙂
There is a village in ukraine that atleast before the war, had a swedish speaking population. Its called Gammalsvenskby
No, they didn't have a Swedish speaking population.
They had a minority Swedish Lutheran population, that kept some Swedish traditions alive. Some of their kids learned Swedish in school as a novelty to keep their heritage afloat, with the help of an online video teacher from Gotland with knowledge in old Eastern Swedish. Their working language was Ukrainian, however. The last native Swedish disappeared nearly a hundred years ago.
@@xyzxyzxyzxyzxyzxyz Oh didn't know that. Thanks for informing me!
The Icelandic immigrants are several generations back. Young people don't speak Icelandic in Gimli anymore.
Ah, one of the weird facts about Canadian Languages exposed. It's one of the weird things I had as a fun fact. Up there with the fact Canada has the most Ukrainian speakers outside of Ukraine and Russia, which is one of the major Ukrainian dialects.
There are more Hindi than french speakers in Manitoba, quebec just has a good propaganda department to keep us all "learning" french
But not that sort of french we need to learn french from the 1600s, it's as if every Amaracan needed to learn Pennsylvania Dutch because the Amish were getting enough beaver pelts and the British didn't care what language they spoke, I think I lost the metaphor but the moral of the story is I can't speak french, and those that do can already speak English so let me study a language like Norwegian so I can understand ola tveiten
It’s even funnier because like half of the Francophones here are Metis, so one would think learning this dialect would not only be better but also contribute to reconciliation… but Quebec and France call it dirty so that’s never happening lol.
well yeah, they both have indigenous arctic peoples....
oh wait that's greenland
"IcelanTic"?
Bri’ish 🤢
Viking descendants: A Viking man can impress women by demonstrating how he takes his longship up a canal to deliver seeds which can be planted in fertile places.
😂😂😂
Why does everyone on UA-cam talk like thiiiiis where the end of each sentence is looooooong if everyone spoke like this in real life it’d be weeeeeeeird lol. I’ve observed there a lot of UA-camrs who either talk like this or like Chills that one UA-camr 😂 idk
French-speaking Quebecers - "Am I a joke to you?"
It’s Québécois
Me: "Oui!"
I am looking forward to Punjab becoming an official language of Canada.
💀
*Punjabi - Punjab is the region of India, Punjabi is the language
If you've spent even 5 minutes in Manitoba you'd know it's no paradise.
Why are you saying “icelan-TIC”? It sounds annoying
He's a nonce
Your gross omission of colonialism is disgusting.
Who's doing the colonizing?
@@ChelleLlewes The Canadian state. Expansion of the prairies and the clearing of the land was done through this process. The land was not magically just empty for the plucky Icelanders to settle (as settlers) it.
@@ReboursCVT Well, your ignorance is astonishing, given that you could have looked it up. They were not colonists; they were REFUGEES.
And your entitlement is what's disgusting.
Gimli is also the town that a passenger flight had to land at because they ran out of fuel due to using the wrong units when filling up the tank
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
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@@mingfanzhang4600 #Islam #KFC
@@mingfanzhang8927 #Ramadan