Annotated Text: A News Article (B2)

Icelandic news prose has a grammatical fingerprint you can spot from across the room: nearly every sentence that reports what someone said sits in the subjunctive, the facts are attributed with a small set of fixed phrases (samkvæmt, að sögn), the action is repeatedly handed over to the passive, and the vocabulary bristles with long solid compounds. Learn to read one news article closely and you have the key to the whole genre — and to an evidential system English handles completely differently. Below is an original news pastiche about a fictional event (no real person, body, or claim is referenced), glossed line by line, then unpacked.

(This page is about how the grammar behaves in a real news text. For the journalistic register as a system — headline style, the inverted pyramid, lexical choices — see register/academic-journalistic. We link out rather than re-derive it.)

The text

A short news item about a fictional traffic incident in an invented town, Vellir.

Read it once as news; now read it again for the grammar. Three features carry almost the whole text — the reported subjunctive, the attribution phrases, and the passive — plus a layer of long compounds to parse. We take them in turn.

The reported subjunctive as an evidential: hafi, sé

Here is the single most important thing about Icelandic journalism. Whenever the article reports a claim made by a source, the verb in the reported clause goes into the subjunctive — hafi runnið ("skidded," literally "may have skidded"), sé að ræða ("is the case"), sé öruggur ("is safe"). This is not optional stylistic flourish. It is doing a precise job: it marks the claim as the source's, not the newspaper's.

Think of it as a built-in evidential. By writing Lögreglan segir að bíllinn *hafi runnið til ("the police say the car skidded"), the paper signals: *this is what the police told us; we are not vouching for it as fact. Had the paper written the indicative hafi → hefur (…að bíllinn *hefur runnið til), it would be asserting the skid as established fact on its own authority — a claim a careful newsroom does not make about a matter still under investigation. The mood choice is the difference between *reporting and asserting.

Notice how the subjunctive percolates through coordinated verbs. In …hafi runnið til … og lent á ljósastaur, the second verb (lent, "hit") is still governed by the same segir að — the whole reported chain stays in the source's voice. English marks this only feebly (the reporting "say that" carries over), but Icelandic keeps the subjunctive live across every verb in the attributed stretch.

Attribution phrases: samkvæmt + dative, að sögn + genitive

News writing cannot keep repeating segir að; it varies the attribution with two fixed prepositional frames, and each governs its own case — a detail English speakers routinely get wrong.

• samkvæmt ("according to") governs the dative: samkvæmt tilkynningu ("according to a statement"), samkvæmt lögreglunni ("according to the police").
• að sögn ("according to / by the account of," literally "by the telling of") governs the genitive: að sögn lögreglu ("according to the police"), að sögn vitna ("according to witnesses").

The genitive in að sögn lögreglu is easy to miss because lögregla ("police") looks unchanged — but lögreglu is the genitive singular, "of the police"; the literal sense is "by the account of the police." With a definite phrase it surfaces clearly: að sögn lögreglunnar ("according to the police," genitive of lögreglan).

Both attribution phrases are adverbial, so fronting them — which is the natural news position, at the head of the sentence — throws the finite verb to second position: Að sögn lögreglu *var maðurinn…, not …maðurinn var*. This V2 inversion is automatic and pervasive in news leads.

The passive: var fluttur, var lokaður, óskað er eftir

News prose loves the passive, and for a reason: the newsworthy thing is usually what happened to someone — a man was taken to hospital, the road was closed — while who did it is either obvious (ambulance crews, the police) or genuinely unknown. The passive lets the affected party occupy the subject slot and demotes or deletes the agent.

Icelandic builds the canonical passive with vera + the past participle, and the participle agrees with the subject in gender, number, and case:

• maðurinn var fluttur — "the man was taken" (fluttur, masculine singular, agreeing with maðurinn).
• vegurinn var lokaður — "the road was closed" (lokaður, masculine, agreeing with vegurinn).

A second passive type appears in the closing line. Óskað er eftir vitnum ("witnesses are being sought," literally "it is wished for witnesses") is an impersonal passive: there is no nominative subject at all, the participle sits in the fixed neuter óskað, and the logical object stays in the case the verb assigns (óska eftir governs the dative, hence vitnum). This agent-free, subject-free construction is the height of the impersonal news register — the investigation is appealing for witnesses, but no human agent is named. (Full treatment: verbs/impersonal-passive.)

Reading the long compounds: fjármálaráðuneytið

The last hurdle for a learner is the news vocabulary's habit of welding several roots into one solid word. Icelandic does not hyphenate or space these; it stacks them. The trick to reading them is to peel from the right: the final element is the head (what the word is), and everything before it modifies it.

The head — the rightmost element — is what carries the gender, declension, and (if present) the suffixed article. So fjármálaráðuneyti*ð* is a neuter noun (ráðuneyti is neuter) with the neuter article -ð; everything to its left (fjármála "of financial matters") is a modifier in the genitive. Once you internalise "peel from the right, the last bit is the noun," even an intimidating fjármálaráðuneytið becomes transparent. (More on how these are built: nouns/compound-nouns.)

The insight: the subjunctive is the newsroom's evidential

Step back and notice the pattern across the whole article. Every sentence that says what a source claims — the police, the spokesperson, the witnesses — sits in the subjunctive (here hafi and sé; a past report would add hefði). Every sentence the paper asserts as plain reportable fact — the road was closed, the man was taken to hospital — sits in the indicative (or in a flat passive of fact). The subjunctive is functioning as an evidential marker: a grammatical stamp that says "source-attributed, not vouched for." English has no such tool; it relies entirely on the lexical "according to" and "the police say" and then drops back into the indicative, leaving the reported content grammatically indistinguishable from fact. Icelandic threads the attribution through the verb of every clause. So when you read Icelandic news, the mood of each verb is telling you, sentence by sentence, whose claim this is — the most pervasive and most easily-missed feature of the genre.

Common Mistakes

After segir að / telur að in news prose, use the subjunctive (hafi, sé). The indicative would have the newspaper vouching for an unverified claim.

Samkvæmt takes the dative; að sögn takes the genitive. Don't reach for the accusative for either.

Að sögn + genitive, and the fronted attribution phrase triggers V2 — the verb comes before the subject.

The active is not ungrammatical, but it is the wrong register choice here: news fronts what happened to people and places via the passive, leaving obvious agents unstated.

The impersonal passive óskað er eftir governs the dative (óska eftir + dat.), and the witness appeal is conventionally plural — vitnum.

Key Takeaways

• The reported subjunctive (segir að … hafi / sé) is an evidential: it marks a claim as the source's, not the paper's. The indicative would make the newspaper assert the fact itself.
• The subjunctive percolates across coordinated verbs in an attributed stretch (hafi runnið … og lent).
• Attribution frames govern fixed cases: samkvæmt + dative, að sögn + genitive — and both invert the verb when fronted (V2).
• News uses two passives: the personal vera
  • agreeing participle (var fluttur, var lokaður) and the impersonal óskað er eftir + dative (no subject, no agent).
• Read long solid compounds by peeling from the right: the final element is the head that carries gender and the article (fjármálaráðuneyti*ð*).