RateItAll: The Opinion Network

Totally useless? Icelandic is a European wonder! It is gorgeous! It is so similar to Old Norse that the children in Icelandic schools can still read the Sagas of the Vikings in its original form, with just a few normalization of a few runic letters that are no longer used.
How many other languages can say that? Latin? Latin is a dead language though. Nobody, as a country, speaks it as an official language.

Learn to speak Icelandic and you learn about English. Why? Because both are branches of the Germanic family of languages. And Icelandic still uses Runic Letters in its alphabet, the same Runic letters that the English alphabet use to have. The rune for "Thorn" is the same rune for the "TH" sound, and when you know what it looks like, then you know what it use to look like in English.
The days of our week? All of them except saturday are named after the pagan gods of the Germanic and Viking tribes.

Wednesday = Wednes dai in Middle English; Wodnesdaeg in Old English; Wodensdag in Old German; all derive from the Germanic/Norse God, Odin.

Thursday = Torsdag in Old Norse (Icelandic); Donarstag in modern German; Donar is "Thorr", the God of Thunder, in German.

Friday = comes from the Norse/Germanic god Freyja.

Easter = Eostre, a germanic goddess whose name was originally reserved for the month of spring, after the equinox.

To see and hear Icelandic spoken is like seeing and hearing English before it was brutalized and blasted to bits by the French in 1066 =)

A totally useless language in that it's spoken by only about 400,000 people worldwide. There's more people than that in Cincinnati. Seeing that it's a language virtually unchanged in like 1,000 years, I'm sure it can't compare in terms of expressiveness with those languages that have developed organically over the course of time.

The granddaddy of all Germanic languages and spoken as a native language today by a little more than 1/4 million people. Modern Icelandic is very close to the Old Norse used in the Norse saga literature, which in turn is very similar to Old English. The physical isolation of Iceland ensured that the language remained largely unchanged over the centuries, virtually free from external linguistic influences. One of the first things that you notice about the spoken language is that the 'th' sound which presents great stumbling blocks for people learning English is used all over the place. It is a beautiful language to listen to, even better if you are listening to it in the form of a song by Sigur Ros.

A truly beautiful language. What fascinates me is that it remained fairly unchanged since the middle ages. Scandinavians should have an easy time learning it, and to a lesser extent, Germans, but it can be a bit tough.