The Impersonal Passive and 'New Passive'

The standard passive you already know promotes an object to subject: bréfið var skrifað "the letter was written." But Icelandic has a second, subjectless passive that has no English equivalent at all — the impersonal passive, which can passivise even intransitive verbs that have no object to promote, leaving a clause with no nominative subject whatsoever: það var dansað "there was dancing." This page covers that fully standard construction and then the construction that grows out of it and divides the country — the New Passive (nýja þolmyndin), where younger speakers extend the subjectless pattern to transitive verbs while keeping the object in the accusative. One is centuries-old and uncontroversial; the other is among the most-studied ongoing changes in any living language. (The personal passive — vera/verða + an agreeing participle — is on verbs/passive-overview; the dummy það on syntax/dummy-thad. We build on both here.)

The impersonal passive: a passive with no subject

Start from the puzzle. A normal passive needs an object to turn into a subject: Einhver skrifaði bréfið ("Someone wrote the letter") → Bréfið var skrifað ("The letter was written"). But what about an intransitive verb — dansa "dance", hlæja "laugh", fara "go" — which has no object at all? English simply cannot passivise these ("it was danced", "it was gone" are not English). Icelandic can, with the **impersonal passive: it inserts a dummy það in the subject slot, puts the verb in a fixed neuter supine, and leaves the clause genuinely subjectless. The dummy það is not a real subject — it is a placeholder filling the V2 first position; the moment something else is fronted, það vanishes.

The semantic effect is precise and very Icelandic: the construction asserts that an activity took place while saying nothing about who did it — not even leaving an implied "by someone" hanging, the way an ordinary passive does. It backgrounds the agent completely. This is why it is the natural register of announcements, reports, and descriptions of communal goings-on: það var kosið "there was voting / a vote was held", það var mótmælt "there were protests".

The participle here is always the fixed neuter singular supine — dansað, sungið, hlegið, farið, kosið — and it never agrees with anything, because there is nothing for it to agree with (no nominative subject). This is the formal hallmark that distinguishes the impersonal passive from the personal one, where the participle agrees in gender, number, and case.

The dummy það disappears under fronting

Because það is only a placeholder for the V2 first slot, fronting any adverbial pushes it out and the verb inverts directly:

This vanishing það is the clearest proof that the construction has no real subject: a genuine subject would not evaporate when you front something. (More on this expletive það on syntax/dummy-thad.)

Transitive verbs and the standard frontier

With a transitive verb, standard Icelandic does not use the impersonal passive to keep the object as an object. The standard route is the personal passive: promote the object to a nominative subject and make the participle agree.

There is one fully standard transitive-looking case worth flagging, because it resembles what comes next but is not controversial: verbs that take a prepositional complement or an oblique (non-accusative) object can appear in an impersonal passive with that complement kept in its oblique case — það var hjálpað sjúklingunum "the patients were helped" (hjálpa governs the dative, so sjúklingunum stays dative), óskað er eftir vitnum "witnesses are sought" (óska eftir + dative). These keep their dative/genitive objects in place and are unremarkable standard Icelandic. The flashpoint is specifically about keeping an accusative object in place — which the standard does not do, and the New Passive does.

The New Passive (nýja þolmyndin): keeping the accusative

Now the live change. The New Passive extends the subjectless, það-plus-neuter-supine pattern of the impersonal passive to ordinary transitive verbs — but instead of promoting the object to nominative (the standard route), it leaves the object in the accusative, in its original object position. So beside the standard Maðurinn var laminn you hear, in younger speech, Það var lamið manninn / mig — with the patient still accusative and the participle frozen as the neuter lamið.

You can see exactly why this is the "New Passive": it looks like a passive (passive morphology — var + supine, no expressed agent) but behaves partly like an active (the object keeps accusative case and its position, as if there were still an unspoken subject doing the hitting). That hybrid is precisely why linguists disagree about what it is: some analyse it as a genuine passive that simply assigns accusative without moving the object; others as an active impersonal — a subjectless active with an unspecified agent — which is why it is also called the New Construction or New Impersonal. The construction grows naturally out of the standard impersonal passive of intransitives (það var dansað) by extending that subjectless template to transitive verbs and letting the object keep its accusative.

How widespread, and what a learner should do

The New Passive is a textbook case of change from below led by the young. A large nationwide survey (Maling & Sigurjónsdóttir), with around 1,700 mostly 15–16-year-old participants, found it accepted by a substantial minority of teenagers and by very few older speakers — the classic spreading-change profile. It is geographically uneven and socially marked, and it is the object of vigorous prescriptive criticism: language columns and teachers treat it as an error to be resisted. For an advanced learner the upshot is twofold. Recognise it: you will hear it in youth and informal speech, and understanding it explains real variation. Don't produce it in writing or formal speech: it is firmly non-standard, and the safe choice is always the standard personal passive (promote the patient to nominative, make the participle agree). The deeper syntactic analysis — the movement debate, the agent diagnostics — is developed on complex/new-passive-deep; the sociolinguistic framing alongside þágufallssýki and flámæli on register/usage-debates.

English vs Icelandic

For an English speaker both constructions are foreign, in escalating degrees. The impersonal passive has no English counterpart whatsoever: English cannot passivise an intransitive verb, so "there was danced / it was gone" is simply impossible, and the idea of a passive clause with no subject at all — not even a demoted one — has nothing to map onto. The closest English gets is the loose "there was dancing," with a gerund doing the work, but that is a nominalisation, not a passive of the verb. The New Passive is foreign in a different way: 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 in object case). The Icelandic innovation — a passive that leaves the patient in the accusative — has no English analogue, which is exactly why English speakers tend not to notice it when they hear it, and why they should learn the retained-accusative diagnostic to spot it.

Common Mistakes

Don't assume intransitive verbs can't passivise. The impersonal passive (það var dansað / farið / hlegið) is standard and is the natural way to say an activity happened with no named doer.

The impersonal-passive supine never agrees and the auxiliary stays singular var — because the clause has no nominative subject. Don't pluralise or inflect either.

The New Passive (það var barið mig, accusative patient) belongs to informal younger speech. For writing and formal speech, use the standard passive: promote the patient to nominative and make the participle agree.

Keep the two systems separate. The standard pairs a nominative patient with an agreeing participle; the New Passive pairs an accusative patient with the fixed neuter supine. Don't mix a nominative patient with a non-agreeing participle.

Oblique-object verbs (hjálpa + dative, óska eftir + dative) keep their object's case in the impersonal passive — and this is standard, unlike the New Passive's retained accusative. Don't switch a dative object to accusative.

Key Takeaways

• The impersonal passive is standard and unique to Icelandic among the languages an English speaker knows: it passivises even intransitive verbs with dummy það
  • a fixed neuter supine (dansað, farið, hlegið) and no subject at all. It asserts that an activity happened while saying nothing about who did it.
• The dummy það is a mere placeholder for the V2 first slot and disappears under fronting (Í gærkvöldi var dansað…), proving the clause is genuinely subjectless. The supine never agrees and the auxiliary stays singular var.
• Oblique-object verbs (hjálpa
  • dative, óska eftir
    • dative) appear in the impersonal passive keeping their dative/genitive object in place — fully standard.
• The New Passive (nýja þolmyndin, það var lamið mig) extends this subjectless template to transitive verbs but keeps the patient in the accusative, in situ, with the fixed neuter supine — a live change in progress led by younger speakers, debated as passive vs active impersonal, and firmly non-standard in writing.
• The diagnostic for the New Passive is the retained accusative object (mig, manninn) where the standard passive would promote it to the nominative (ég var laminn / maðurinn var laminn). Recognise it; for writing, use the standard personal passive.