Stig A1 · Skref 01
Stafrófið
The Alphabet
Thirty-two letters, and you can hear every one of them without leaving this page. Four of them do not exist in English, four of the English ones are missing here, and the accents are not decoration — a and á are two different letters that sound nothing alike.
Icelandic has 32 letters. Press a letter to hear it. Take your time —
there is no clock here.
Íslenska hefur 32 stafi. Ýttu á staf til að heyra hann.
No Icelandic voice on this device — here is how to add one (2 minutes)
The page speaks Icelandic using a voice that lives on your own device, so nothing has to load from anywhere. If your device does not have one yet, the play buttons will open a native recording on Forvo instead — and you can add the voice like this:
- iPhone / iPad: Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices → Icelandic → download Alfur or Dóra.
- Mac: System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → System Voice → Manage Voices → Icelandic.
- Windows: Settings → Time & Language → Language → Add a language → Icelandic, and tick Speech.
- Android: Settings → Accessibility → Text-to-speech → install the Icelandic voice data if your engine offers it.
Safari and Chrome both use it once it is installed. You may need to reload this page.
Stafirnir 32 · All thirty-two
Press a letter, hear its name
Ýttu á staf · Press a letter
The big button says the letter's name — what you would say reading it out. The small button under it says a word that starts with it. Blue tiles are the four letters English does not have.
Every letter has a word to go with it. Press the letter, then press the word.
Sérstöku stafirnir · The four that are ours
Þ, Ð, Æ and Ö
These four are why Icelandic looks the way it does. Þ and ð are the two halves of English th — Icelandic kept them, English spelled them away.
Þorn · thorn
The hard, breathy th in thing — no voice in it, just air. It only ever appears at the start of a word: þú, það, þrír, þakka.
Never write it in the middle or the end.
Eð · eth
The soft, buzzing th in father — put your hand on your throat and you will feel it. The mirror image of þ: it never starts a word. bað, eða, við, góður.
Capital Ð shows up in names and headlines only.
Æ · ash
Not "ae". One sound, the i in mile: ær, ætla, læsa, hæ. It is a single letter with its own place in the alphabet, second from last.
Ö · the last letter
Round your lips as if for o, then say e. Close to the u in fur, or German ö: ör, öll, tölva, höfn.
It ends the alphabet — so Ö is the Icelandic Z.
Broddstafir · The accented letters
The accent is not stress — it is a different letter
This is the single most expensive mistake beginners make. Á is not a louder a; it is its own letter, with its own sound and its own place in the dictionary. Press both and hear the gap.
Muna · Remember
Stress in Icelandic is never marked, because it never moves: áherslan er alltaf á fyrsta atkvæði — the stress is always on the first syllable, in every word, including the long ones. EYja·fjalla·jökull.
Stafirnir sem vantar · The missing letters
C, Q, W — and the Z that was abolished
Four letters you already know are not in the Icelandic alphabet. They turn up only in foreign names and borrowed brand names, and they sort at the end.
Menning · A bit of history
Z was a real Icelandic letter until 1973, when a spelling reform removed it: it had been kept for historical reasons long after Icelanders had stopped hearing any difference between z and s. Writers and newspapers who had learned the old spelling went on using it for years afterwards, and you will still meet verzlun where the rules now say verslun — on old shop signs, company names, and in anything printed before the reform.
Hlustunarpróf · Listening test
Hear it, then pick it
Press play, listen, choose the letter. Get it wrong and the page plays your answer and the right one back to back, so you hear exactly what the difference was. Nothing is timed and nothing is lost by guessing.
Press the blue button. Listen. Then press the letter you heard. You can listen as many times as you like.
Hlustaðu · Listen
Menning · Culture
The alphabet, performed
Every language has a song for teaching children their letters. Icelandic has this, and it is not really for children.
Watch it once for the joke and a second time for the work it is doing: the rhythm it puts on þ and ð, and the way ö lands at the end where English puts z. That ending is the thing to take away — Icelanders reciting the alphabet finish on ö, and an alphabetical list of names in Reykjavík finishes there too.
Heimildir · Sources. The order of the alphabet, the Icelandic name of each letter and the status of c, q, w and z follow the standard published description of Icelandic orthography (Wikipedia, Icelandic orthography). The example words are everyday dictionary words, chosen so that each one begins with its own letter. Written for Íslenska saman.