ICELANDIC 101...a beginner course

I've been practicing my Icelandic 😎 in an attempt to pronounce some of the destinations we'll visit in Iceland (Eess-land) so no one will know I'm a foreigner.  Seriously, if I used the English sounds we associate with certain letters, it would be a total embarrassment, perhaps even insulting to Icelanders. 🤔 I learned this lesson when I couldn't pronounce Maori back in New Zealand. 

As you all know, Icelandic is a Germanic language, derived from Old Norse, with 32 letters in its alphabet.  There are 7 vowels, including y and the funky æ (aye).  With accents added to 5 of the vowels plus the ö (umlaut over the o), there are 12 different vowel sounds to confuse us.  The letters c, q, w and z are nonexistent, but the Icelandic alphabet has 2 additional consonants not known in modern English, Þ and ð (thorn and eth), plus some odd letter combinations that sound nothing like their English counterparts, such as ll.  

Try to pronounce these fun Icelandic tongue 👅 twisters...

Þingvellir  Snæfellsnes  Eyjafjallajökull  Kerið    Yikes!!!

I'll try to help...

Þingvellir....is the name of a major national park along the Golden Circle where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet and where the original Icelandic Parliament convened.  It's an important place visited by most tourists.  The letter Þ is called thorn and sounds like th...it's not a P even though it looks like one!  ll is pronounced tl.  The word is pronounced Thing-vetlir.  Not Pingveller.

Snæfellsnes Peninsula...is north of Reykjavik (Rake-ya-veek...the j sounds like y).  The æ sounds like a long i, just like its name aye.  With the ll combination, it is pronounced Snigh-fetl-ness.

Eyjafjallajökull Volcano...is that pesky volcano that blew up and halted European air traffic for a few days back in 2010.  If you simply remember that j sounds like y and ll sounds like tl, you've got this! 👊🏻  Aye-yaye-yaye-yaye-yaye is not correct! 😳  It is pronounced Aye-ya-fyatla-yuhktl.  And translated, that means island/mountain/glacier, which makes perfect sense because it is a volcano that erupted under a glacier on an island .  Now that you know that, you won't be able to mispronounce the word for glacier, jökull or yuhktl.  Now try Snæfellsjökull.  It's very confusing, right?

Kerið Crater...has the ð, called eth.  I couldn't tell if it was an o or a d.  What do you think?  It sounds like th.  So the word is not pronounced Kerid or Kerio.  

The above information will be on the final exam at the end of the trip!