Modern Icelandic has changed so little that speakers can still read medieval sagas.

Iceland’s geographic isolation kept its language relatively insulated from the kind of rapid change that reshaped most other European languages over the centuries. As a result, modern Icelandic remains close enough to Old Norse, the language of the medieval sagas written starting around the 13th century, that Icelandic schoolchildren can read those original texts with only modest difficulty, rather than needing a translation into a modern form the way English speakers need for Old English.

Iceland has also actively resisted borrowing foreign words for new concepts, instead coining new terms from existing Icelandic roots — the word for “computer,” “tölva,” combines the words for “number” and “prophetess,” for instance. That combination of isolation and deliberate linguistic conservatism makes Icelandic one of the best-documented examples of a living language staying remarkably stable over roughly 800 years.