Icelandic in danger of dying out due to AI and English-language media –former PM (www.theguardian.com)

Iceland’s former prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir warns the Icelandic language — spoken by roughly 350,000 people — could be “wiped out in a generation” as English-language media and the training practices behind large language models shift reading, conversation and content consumption toward English. Speaking after releasing a new novel, she said youths increasingly consume and even converse in English online, and that the predominance of English in the corpora used to train AI systems accelerates this cultural and linguistic erosion. Iceland has tried to be proactive — for example, Anthropic recently partnered with Iceland’s ministry of education on a nationwide AI-in-education pilot giving hundreds of teachers access to AI tools — but Jakobsdóttir argues more coordinated effort is needed to preserve national language use and cultural value. For the AI/ML community this is a concrete example of how data imbalance and model training choices have sociocultural consequences: low‑resource languages risk being overshadowed by English not only in visibility but in model outputs, synthetic content, and downstream tools. Technical responses include curating representative Icelandic corpora, provenance-aware datasets, targeted fine-tuning or multilingual models optimized for low‑resource languages, and policy support for content creation and dataset governance. The case underscores that AI development isn’t language‑neutral — dataset composition, educational deployment, and incentives for native-language digital content will determine whether small languages survive the AI era.