Annotated Text: An Informal Email

An informal Icelandic email lives in a register all its own — looser than formal writing, but tidier than the way people actually talk. It is where you meet the everyday búinn að perfect (Ég er búinn að flytja, "I've moved"), the warm one-word openers and closers (Hæ …, Kveðja, Anna), and a narration that slips between present and past the way English does. Below is a realistic email from Anna to her friend Davíð, glossed line by line, then unpacked — the resultative búinn að, the informal sign-offs, and why the tenses jump around the way they do. (For the register itself — what counts as colloquial versus formal — see register/formal-vs-colloquial.)

The email

Anna writes to Davíð after moving to a new flat, and floats a plan for the weekend.

It reads casually — but it is full of structure. Three things repay a close look: the búinn að perfect, the informal frame (opener, particles, sign-off), and the tense choices in the narration.

Hæ … / Hvað segirðu gott? — the informal opening

A formal Icelandic letter opens with Kæri Davíð ("Dear Davíð") or Sæll, Davíð. An email to a friend does not: it opens with Hæ (a borrowing from English "hi," fully naturalised, spelled with æ) plus the name. Then comes the all-purpose greeting Hvað segirðu gott? — literally "What do you say good?", the idiomatic "How's it going?" Note the contraction: segirðu is segir þú ("do you say") fused into one word, the þ- of þú softening to -ðu and clitic­ising onto the verb. This contraction is a hallmark of relaxed register; you would not write segir þú out in full to a friend.

Ég er búin að flytja — the resultative perfect

Here is the grammatical heart of the email. To say "I have moved," everyday Icelandic does not reach for a have-perfect. It uses vera búin/búinn að + infinitive, literally "to be finished to move." So:

• Ég ("I") er ("am") búin ("finished," feminine because Anna is a woman) að flytja ("to move") = "I have moved / I've finished moving."

The adjective búinn agrees with the subject. A woman writes búin, a man writes búinn, and a group writes búin (neuter plural). Anna, being female, writes Ég er búin að flytja; Davíð replying would write Ég er búinn að flytja. This construction stresses the completed result — the moving is done, here is the new state — which is exactly what a perfect does. It is the colloquial workhorse for "have done something," far more frequent in speech and informal writing than the formal hafa-perfect (ég hef flutt). (Full paradigm and the contrast with hafa: verbs/bua-ad-resultative.)

Var að + infinitive — the "was in the middle of" past

The email also uses Ég var að pakka upp ("I was unpacking"). The frame vera að + infinitive marks an action in progress — Icelandic's nearest equivalent to the English progressive "-ing." In the past (var að), it means "was in the process of." Anna pairs it with a plain preterite, fann ("found"): she was unpacking (ongoing) when she found (single completed event) the old stuff. That present-progressive-versus-simple-past split is doing the same narrative work it does in English.

Tense choices: present for the now, preterite for the story

Notice how the email moves between tenses, and why. The present describes the current state — Nýja íbúðin *er geðveikt fín ("The new flat *is amazingly nice"), because it is still nice right now. The preterite (simple past) carries the little story of yesterday — pakkaði, fann, var ("unpacked, found, was"). And the búinn að perfect bridges them: a past action (the moving) with present relevance (here I now am, moved in). This is exactly the English instinct — "I've moved, the flat is lovely, yesterday I found a photo" — so the tense logic transfers cleanly; what differs is only the form of the perfect.

The word geðveikt deserves a flag of its own. Literally "insanely / madly," it is the everyday colloquial intensifier — geðveikt fín, geðveikt gaman ("amazingly nice," "loads of fun"). It is perfectly normal among friends and completely out of place in formal writing, where you would write mjög ("very") or afar ("extremely") instead. (informal) Mark it mentally as register-bound.

Closing: Kveðja / Bestu kveðjur / Knús — and the English-sign-off trap

Icelandic sign-offs scale with formality. From warmest-casual to most formal:

Anna chose Knús ("Hugs") because she and Davíð are close. The key trap for English speakers is reaching for an English closer — Best, Anna or Cheers, Anna — or, worse, translating literally as Kærar kveðjur þínar, which sounds stilted. Pick a real Icelandic formula. (More on openers and closers across registers: discourse/openers-closers.)

Vocabulary and forms

Things English speakers get wrong here

Key Takeaways

• An informal email opens with Hæ + name and Hvað segirðu gott?, not the formal Kæri ….
• The everyday perfect is vera búin(n) að + infinitive (Ég er búin að flytja), not the formal hafa-perfect. búin (f.) / búinn (m.) must agree with the subject.
• vera að + infinitive is the progressive ("was unpacking"); narration mixes present (current state) with preterite (the little story), just as English does.
• Colloquial intensifiers like geðveikt ("amazingly") and -ðu contractions (segirðu, láttu, heyrðu) signal the relaxed written register.
• Close with a real Icelandic sign-off — Knús (warmest), Bestu kveðjur, or Kveðja — never an English one.