Usage Debates: þágufallssýki, flámæli, the New Passive

Every standardised language has a handful of features that prescriptivists police and ordinary speakers produce anyway, and Icelandic — with its strong purist tradition and unusually unified standard — polices them with notable energy. Three debates are canonical, and an advanced learner needs to understand all three: not to "fix" their Icelandic, but to read the social signal each one carries and to know which form to say versus which to write. They are þágufallssýki ("dative sickness"), flámæli (a stigmatised vowel merger), and nýja þolmyndin ("the New Passive"). This page treats each one descriptively (what speakers actually do, and why) and prescriptively (what the standard prescribes, and the social cost of departing from it). The deep syntax of the New Passive lives on complex/new-passive-deep and the syntax of dative substitution on complex/dative-substitution-deep; here we stay at the level of the debate itself.

þágufallssýki: 'dative sickness'

This is the most famous Icelandic usage debate, and the one a learner will collide with daily. A small but very common set of verbs — langa "want", vanta "need/lack", dreyma "dream", hungra/þyrsta "be hungry/thirsty" — take an accusative experiencer subject in the standard: the person who wants or lacks goes in the accusative, not the nominative.

This is already counter-intuitive (the "subject" is in the object case — see verbs/accusative-subject-verbs), and that is precisely the pressure point. A very large and growing share of speakers replace the accusative mig/þig/hann with the dative mér/þér/honum, producing mér langar, mér vantar. This substitution is þágufallssýki, literally "dative sickness." It was noticed and named in the 1920s, and it has spread steadily ever since; descriptions of present-day Icelandic report it as essentially universal as a tendency — virtually every speaker produces it at least sometimes, and for many it is the default.

Why does it happen? Because the dative is the regular case for experiencer subjects across a much larger class of verbs — mér finnst "I find/think", mér líður vel "I feel well", mér leiðist "I'm bored", mér þykir "I deem". The dative is the typical experiencer marker, so speakers generalise it onto the smaller accusative class. It is a textbook analogical change: an irregular minority pattern (accusative mig langar) being levelled towards the regular majority pattern (dative mér finnst). That regularising pressure is why the change is so robust — and why it is, by most assessments, slowly winning.

A note on a near neighbour: the verbs hlakka til ("look forward to") and kvíða (fyrir) ("dread") take a nominative subject in the standard — ég hlakka til, ég kvíði fyrir — and the same regularising pressure produces the non-standard mér/mig hlakkar til. The direction differs (here the standard is nominative, not accusative), but the phenomenon is the same family of "experiencer-subject reanalysis." The safe standard forms are ég hlakka til and ég kvíði fyrir.

flámæli: the stigmatised vowel merger

The second debate is about pronunciation, not case, and it is unusual in the world's languages: a dialect feature that was deliberately and largely eradicated by a national campaign. Flámæli ("slack-jawed speech") is the merger — or approaching — of two pairs of short vowels:

• the e / i pair: the vowels of flet and flit drift towards each other (phonetically /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ moving together);
• the ö / u pair: the vowels of flökt and flugt-type words likewise approach (phonetically /œ/ and /ʏ/).

The result is that minimal pairs distinguished only by these vowels can sound alike — and, tellingly, schoolchildren who had the merger would also misspell the vowels, which is what alarmed the authorities. Flámæli was noticed in the 1920s, stigmatised as "fishermen's speech" / "slack-jawed," and from the mid-twentieth century targeted by an explicit campaign through the schools. It was, by the late twentieth century, very largely eradicated in Iceland — an almost unique case of a successful, deliberate reversal of a sound change. Traces survive regionally and, notably, in North American Icelandic (the speech of the descendants of emigrants), where the campaign never reached and the merger continued unchecked.

The lesson for a learner is mostly cautionary: flámæli is the one feature here you are unlikely to acquire (it has been suppressed in Iceland), but you should know what it is so that the stigma attached to it doesn't mislead you — and so you can recognise it if you meet older or diaspora speech. Crucially, do not import the merger into your own pronunciation: keep i and e, u and ö distinct.

The New Passive (nýja þolmyndin): a change in progress

The third debate is the most syntactically interesting and the most genuinely unsettled — a change still happening, studied as one of the clearest live examples of ongoing syntactic change in any language. Standard Icelandic has a personal passive that promotes the object to a nominative subject: from Einhver lamdi manninn ("Someone hit the man," manninn accusative) you get the standard passive Maðurinn var laminn ("The man was hit," maðurinn nominative, the participle laminn agreeing).

The New Passive does something different. It keeps the patient in the accusative, in its original object position, and adds a dummy það: Það var lamið mig ("There was hitting [of] me" → "I got hit"). The object mig stays accusative; the participle stays in the fixed neuter lamið and does not agree. Compare:

The New Passive grows out of the fully standard impersonal passive of intransitive verbs (það var dansað "there was dancing" — see verbs/impersonal-passive) by extending that subjectless, accusative-keeping pattern to transitive verbs. Its grammatical status is genuinely debated among linguists: some analyse it as a true passive that simply assigns accusative without movement, others as an active impersonal (a subjectless active with an unspecified agent) — which is why it is also called the "New Construction" / "New Impersonal." A large nationwide survey of mostly 15–16-year-olds (around 1,700 participants) found it accepted by a substantial minority of teenagers and very few older speakers — the classic age profile of a change spreading from below, with younger speakers leading.

English vs Icelandic: why these debates have no English equivalent

These three controversies are hard for an English speaker to feel because English lacks the machinery they turn on. Þágufallssýki is a fight over case on the subject — English has no subject-case distinction beyond I/me, and crucially no class of verbs that put the experiencer in an object case, so "the subject should be accusative, not dative" is an alien proposition. Flámæli has loose analogues (English has plenty of stigmatised mergers, like the pin/pen merger), but no English merger was ever the target of a successful national eradication campaign — the Icelandic case is exceptional. The New Passive is the deepest gap: English has exactly one passive and it always promotes the object to subject ("the man was hit," never "there was hit the man" with the object kept accusative). The Icelandic innovation — a passive that leaves the object in object case — has no English counterpart at all, which is why English speakers tend not even to notice it when they hear it.

Common Mistakes

The single most important takeaway: langa, vanta, dreyma take an accusative subject (mig) in the standard. The dative (mér) is widespread in speech but stigmatised in writing — write mig langar.

Don't over-correct in the wrong direction. Hearing mér langar everywhere does not make mig langar obsolete; the accusative is the standard you should produce in careful contexts.

hlakka til and kvíða are nominative-subject verbs in the standard (ég hlakka til). Switching to a dative or accusative experiencer is the non-standard reanalysis, not an improvement.

The New Passive (það var barið mig, accusative patient in situ) belongs to informal, younger speech. In writing, use the standard passive — and beware that some genuinely standard impersonal passives (with prepositional verbs like ráðast á) look superficially similar but are fine.

Key Takeaways

• þágufallssýki ("dative sickness"): the standard puts the experiencer subject of langa, vanta, dreyma in the accusative (mig langar); the widespread non-standard variant uses the dative (mér langar). Named in the 1920s, it is spreading by analogy with the large dative-experiencer class (mér finnst) and is arguably winning — but remains stigmatised. Hear mér langar, write mig langar.
• hlakka til / kvíða are nominative-subject verbs (ég hlakka til); the dative/accusative reanalysis is the non-standard variant.
• flámæli: the stigmatised e/i and ö/u vowel merger, noticed in the 1920s, largely eradicated by 20th-century schooling — a near-unique successful reversal of a sound change. Survives regionally and in North American Icelandic. Recognise it; don't adopt it.
• The New Passive (nýja þolmyndin, það var lamið mig): a live change in progress, extending the standard impersonal passive to transitive verbs, keeping the patient in the accusative in situ with a non-agreeing neuter participle. Led by younger speakers; status (passive vs active impersonal) debated. Firmly non-standard in writing.
• None of the three has a clean English analogue, because English lacks subject-case marking on experiencers, never eradicated a merger by campaign, and has only the object-promoting passive.