Where did inhalation come from while saying “Yes”?
What many newcomers to Iceland notice when listening to Icelanders talk to each other is that they sometimes say “Yes” when inhaling. This idiom, known as an inflection, is used to indicate emphasis on agreement or to encourage the speaker to continue speaking.
This is normal language for all Icelanders. In fact, so natural that the Icelanders we spoke to were honestly surprised to hear that many foreigners find this interesting. But where did the suction actually come from?
It turns out: we don’t know. We asked several Icelandic linguists, experts in the language and its history, who have spent years studying every detail of the language, and none of them knew about the origin of infiltration or when it reached Iceland. However, we did some digging of our own and found clues that gave rise to speculation.
The infiltration reveals that it is not at home in Iceland. It is known in linguistics as the “attack sound” and is actually found in northern Germany, across Scandinavia, in parts of Ireland and even in the seas of Canada. Moreover, it is also done with local variations of “yes” and done for the same reasons. This could mean – and we are not anthropologists – that the infiltration moved across these areas.
However, we have no idea where the infiltration came from, nor when it arrived in Iceland. As such, it may remain a mystery, until a linguist or anthropologist reading this e-mails us to clarify.
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