Spelling Reforms and Reading Older Texts

If you pick up an Icelandic book printed in 1890, or 1930, or a normalised edition of a medieval saga, you will be struck by how little the spelling has changed. A modern reader handles century-old Icelandic print almost transparently — which is extraordinary, and the opposite of what an English speaker is used to, where even Shakespeare's spelling looks foreign. Icelandic has had only a handful of modest orthographic reforms, and they are recent. This page catalogues the ones that matter for reading: the 1973 abolition of z, the earlier replacement of the digraph je with é, the nineteenth-century standardisation that fixed today's accents and the í/ý spellings, and the small differences between modern, early-twentieth-century, and normalised-medieval orthography. The dedicated letter page (spelling/c-q-w-z) covers the z → s rule for writing; here we set it in the wider history a reader needs.

1. The 1973 abolition of z

The most consequential reform for a reader is the removal of z. Until 1973, z was a normal letter of Icelandic spelling — but it spelled no distinct sound. Historically z represented an affricate [t͡s] that had arisen from the clusters t+s, d+s, and ð+s; by modern times that had long since merged with plain [s]. So z was a purely etymological letter: it was written where an s descended from one of those old clusters, and schoolchildren had to memorise word by word where it belonged, with no help from the ear. In September 1973 a ministerial decree abolished z from the standard orthography and replaced it with s.

So the z → s swap is, above all, a reading skill. Any book, newspaper, or shop sign from before the mid-1970s may write íslenzka, verzlun, bezt; mentally replace z with s and you have the modern word. A few z*s survive deliberately — the school *Verzlunarskóli Íslands, the surname Zoëga, the newspaper Morgunblaðið occasionally — and unassimilated loans like pizza keep theirs. But in any recognisably native modern word, z is gone. (Full detail on those survivals: spelling/c-q-w-z.)

2. je → é: the older digraph for é

The second change a reader meets is the letter é. In older Icelandic print — much of the nineteenth century especially — the sound now written é was very often spelled with the digraph je, reflecting its pronunciation [jɛ] ("ye"). So you will encounter older jeg for modern ég ("I"), mjer for modern mér ("to me"), fjell for modern fell / féll, and the loanword now spelled jeppi sits in the same orthographic neighbourhood. Over the course of standardisation the digraph je was replaced by the single accented letter é for this vowel, bringing the spelling into line with the modern accented system.

A caution on dating, because the sources disagree and you should not be misled by a confident-sounding single year. The accented é is old — it appears in some medieval manuscripts — but it fell out of use, and je became the common print convention; é was then re-adopted and standardised as part of the broader nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century regularisation of Icelandic spelling. Exactly when it became the official norm is given differently by different references (you will see the 1830s, you will see a 1929 standardisation, and you will see the early twentieth century cited). What matters for a reader is the pattern, not the year: in older print, je often stands where modern Icelandic writes é — recognise it and read on.

3. The nineteenth-century standardisation: accents and í/ý

The biggest single move in Icelandic orthographic history was not a dramatic reform but a standardisation, in the nineteenth century, that pulled spelling back toward the classical, etymological model — work strongly associated with the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (whose 1818 grammar was foundational) and with the Icelandic philologists who built on it. Two of its results are exactly what makes older print so readable today.

First, the accents were fixed. The acute-accented vowels á, é, í, ó, ú, ý are treated as separate letters standing for distinct sounds (long monophthongs and diphthongs), not as stress marks on the plain vowels — a principle this guide hammers throughout (see writing/alphabet). Once standardised, the accent system has been remarkably stable, which is why a modern reader meets the same á/é/í/ó/ú/ý in 1880s print as today.

Second, the etymological í/ý (and i/y) distinction was maintained. Although i and y (and í and ý) had merged in pronunciation centuries earlier — y sounds exactly like i, ý exactly like í — the standard spelling kept them apart on historical grounds, writing y/ý where the word's etymology demanded it. This is the single biggest source of native spelling difficulty for Icelanders themselves, because the ear gives no clue; you must know the word's history. Crucially for a reader, the í/ý spellings in old standardised print are essentially the same as today's, so they pose no extra obstacle. (The synchronic rule-of-thumb and the memorisation problem are on spelling/i-vs-y; the wider etymological-spelling principle on spelling/silent-and-etymological.)

4. Three layers of spelling a reader meets

Putting it together, an Icelandic reader effectively navigates three closely-spaced orthographic layers, none of them far from the others:

The striking thing about this table is how shallow it is. The distance from a normalised thirteenth-century saga to a modern paperback is a handful of conventions; the distance from nineteenth-century print to today is essentially z and the odd je. (The medieval-normalised end — ek, at, the free-standing hinn, archaic pronouns — is the business of register/literary-archaic and texts/saga-overview.)

English vs Icelandic: the opposite of a spelling nightmare

Here is the cross-linguistic punchline. English orthography is a historical disaster zone: centuries of unreformed spelling sit on top of the Great Vowel Shift and waves of borrowing, so spelling and pronunciation diverged wildly (through, though, thought, tough), and older English spelling is wildly variable and often unreadable without training. Spelling reform in English is famously impossible. Icelandic went the other way. Its spelling was deliberately standardised toward the classical model and then reformed only modestly and recently (the je → é tidy-up; the 1973 removal of the soundless z). The result is an orthography that is (a) highly regular for the modern learner — you can pronounce almost any written word from the rules — and (b) stable backward in time, so older texts are orthographically transparent.

The practical consequence for you as a learner is liberating and worth stating plainly: when an older Icelandic text defeats you, the spelling is almost never the culprit. The barrier will be an unfamiliar word, an old construction, or a dense subjunctive — not a strange way of spelling a word you know. Fix the z in your head, read je as é, and the orthography of the last two centuries is essentially yours already.

Common Mistakes

Writing z in a native modern word is a dated spelling. Reserve z for the few survivals (pizza, surnames like Zoëga, the Verzlunarskóli name).

When you meet je inside a word in older print, read it as é. It is a spelling convention, not a different word.

Key Takeaways

• Icelandic spelling reform has been modest and recent, so older print is nearly modern — the opposite of English's chaotic spelling history.
• 1973: z abolished, replaced by s (íslenzka → íslenska, verzlun → verslun, bezt → best). z had spelled no distinct sound (an old [t͡s] long merged with [s]); the swap z → s is a reading skill for pre-mid-1970s texts.
• Older print often writes the digraph je where modern Icelandic writes é (jeg → ég, mjer → mér, rjett → rétt); read je as é. (The exact official date of the je → é standardisation is reported inconsistently across sources.)
• The nineteenth-century standardisation fixed today's accents (á é í ó ú ý as distinct letters) and kept the etymological í/ý spellings (identical in old and modern print, learned by word not by ear).
• Because the orthography is stable backward in time, older-text difficulty in Icelandic is lexical and syntactic, not orthographic — fix z and je and the spelling of the last two centuries is already yours.