The New Passive: An Ongoing Change in Real Time

Most syntactic change is invisible while it happens — you only see it after it is finished, by comparing old texts with new. Icelandic offers a rare exception: a change you can watch unfold now, with two generations of speakers literally disagreeing about whether a sentence is grammatical. It is the New Impersonal Passive (nýja þolmyndin, also "the New Construction" / "New Impersonal"), and it is one of the most-studied live syntactic changes in any language. The construction looks like a passive but does something no standard passive does: it leaves the patient in the accusative, sitting in the object position, while a dummy það fills the front and the participle freezes in the neuter. Það var lamið mig — roughly "there-was hit me," i.e. "I got hit." The standard page on the regular passive lives elsewhere; the register page gives the social verdict. This page asks the structural question the others leave open: what kind of clause is this, and why does its retention of the accusative make it arguably not a passive at all but an impersonal active?

The baseline: what the standard passive does

To see what is new, fix what is old. The standard Icelandic passive does exactly what the English passive does, only with visible case. It takes the object of an active clause, promotes it to subject, gives it nominative case, and makes the participle agree with it. From the active Einhver lamdi manninn "someone hit the man" (object manninn, accusative) you get the passive Maðurinn var laminn "the man was hit": the patient is now nominative maðurinn, the verb agrees, and the participle laminn is masculine singular to match. The agent disappears (or appears in an af-phrase). This is promotion — the hallmark of a real passive.

Note especially that with a quirky-case verb, the standard passive still respects case preservation: the passive of dative-governing hjálpa gives a dative subject, Honum var hjálpað. But for an ordinary accusative-object verb like lemja, the standard passive nominativises the patient. That nominativisation is exactly the step the New Passive refuses to take.

The New Passive: the accusative stays in place

Now the innovation. The New Passive starts from the same active clause and the same patient, but it does not promote. The patient stays where the object was, keeps its accusative, a dummy það fills the clause-initial position, and the participle stays in the fixed default neuter — it does not agree, because there is no nominative subject for it to agree with.

Put the two side by side and the structural divergence is total. The standard does three things — promote, nominativise, agree — and the New Passive does none of them: no promotion, accusative retained, participle frozen.

Why this is arguably an impersonal active, not a passive

Here is the theoretical heart of the matter, and the reason linguists are genuinely divided. A passive, by definition, demotes the agent and promotes the patient. The New Passive demotes the agent (there is no overt subject) but does not promote the patient — it leaves it exactly where an object sits, in exactly the case an object bears. That is half a passive. And a clause with an unexpressed agent and an accusative object in situ is precisely the shape of an impersonal active — an active clause whose subject happens to be an unspecified "someone," with the object behaving like a normal object.

The accusative is the load-bearing evidence. Accusative is the case the object of an active verb receives; it is assigned by the active verb to its complement. If mig is accusative in Það var lamið mig, then lamið is, in the relevant sense, still assigning active object case to mig — which means the verb has not really been passivised at all. On this analysis the New Passive is a new active voice: an impersonal active that uses passive morphology (the vera + participle shape) while keeping active syntax (an accusative object in place). Icelandic would be innovating a construction that pairs the look of the passive with the case-frame of the active, and learners are watching a language assemble a brand-new voice category out of old parts.

Where it comes from: the genuine impersonal passive next door

The New Passive did not appear from nowhere; it grew out of a fully standard neighbour, the impersonal passive of intransitive verbs (see verbs/impersonal-passive). Icelandic has long allowed Það var dansað "there was dancing" and Það var sofið illa "people slept badly" — subjectless passives of verbs that have no object to promote in the first place. These are uncontroversially standard. There is also a standard impersonal passive of prepositional verbs that looks dangerously like the New Passive but is not: with ráðast á "attack" (which governs á + accusative), the standard form is Það var ráðist á mig / Ráðist var á mig "I was attacked." Here mig is accusative — but it is accusative because it is the object of the preposition á, not because the verb failed to promote it. The verb ráðast has no direct object to promote; the accusative belongs to á. This construction is centuries old and perfectly standard.

The New Passive is what you get when speakers extend this subjectless, case-keeping pattern from intransitive and prepositional verbs (where it is standard) to ordinary transitive verbs with direct objects (where the standard demands promotion). The grammar already had a subjectless, accusative-tolerating template; the change generalises it one step further than the standard allows. That is why it feels so natural to the speakers who have it — they are applying an existing pattern more broadly, not inventing a foreign one.

The age-grading: a change spreading from below

The sociolinguistic profile is the cleanest part of the picture and the reason this construction is famous. A large nationwide survey, dominated by 15–16-year-olds (around 1,700 participants), found the New Passive accepted by a substantial minority of teenagers and by very few older speakers. That distribution — strong in the young, weak in the old, with intermediate ages in between — is the textbook signature of a change in progress spreading from below: an innovation that enters through younger speakers and works its way up the age scale over time. If the survey were repeated in a generation, the prediction is that the acceptance line will have shifted upward. You can, in effect, see the leading edge of the change in the difference between how a teenager and their grandparent judge Það var lamið mig.

What it means for a learner

You will hear the New Passive, especially from younger speakers and in casual narration of events ("I got hit," "the window got broken"). You should be able to recognise it — the giveaway is the accusative patient (mig, hann, manninn, stelpuna) sitting where you expected a nominative subject — but you should not produce it in writing or formal speech, where it is firmly non-standard. The trap for English speakers is the opposite of over-producing: it is failing to notice it at all. English has only the promoting passive, so an English ear is not tuned to a passive that keeps the object in object case; learners often parse Það var lamið mig as some odd active and miss that they have just heard the most famous ongoing change in the language.

Common Mistakes

The signature is the accusative. Train yourself to flag a patient in the object case after a passive-looking verb as the New Passive.

The prepositional impersonal passive only looks like the New Passive. Check whether the accusative is the object of a preposition (standard) or a stranded direct object (New).

Key Takeaways

• The standard passive promotes the patient to a nominative subject and makes the participle agree: Maðurinn var laminn, Ég var laminn.
• The New Passive (nýja þolmyndin) keeps the patient in the accusative in its object position, adds a dummy það, and freezes the participle in the neuter: Það var lamið mig / manninn — no promotion, no agreement.
• Because the patient keeps the accusative (the case an active verb gives its object), the New Passive is arguably an impersonal active in passive morphology, not a true passive — which is why it is also called the New Construction.
• It is an extension of the genuinely standard impersonal passive (intransitive Það var dansað; prepositional Ráðist var á mig) to transitive verbs with direct objects; the prepositional type looks similar but is standard, because its accusative belongs to the preposition.
• It is a change in progress spreading from below: accepted by a substantial minority of teenagers and very few older speakers — a textbook age-graded profile.
• For learners: recognise it (the giveaway is the accusative patient mig/hann/manninn in situ), but do not write it — it is firmly non-standard. The English-speaker pitfall is not over-using it but failing to notice it, since English has only the promoting passive.