#20: Að Gúgla

I've pointed out in several previous posts that Icelandic is generally resistant to foreign loanwords. That's definitely true-- there's a strong linguistic purism movement in Iceland, which means that whenever a new word is needed, it is typically constructed from pre-existing Icelandic roots. The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies and several other organizations involved in regulating the language are very supportive of this, which is how we get a word like sporðdreki ("tail dragon") instead of something boring like "skorpió." Sometimes, these sorts of things are even crowd-sourced, with competitions being held in schools or via milk cartons. The carton to the left, for instance, asks consumers to come up with a word for reality television shows. The word that the carton puts forth is raunveruleikaþáttur (which does literally mean "reality program"), but people with better ideas are encouraged to submit them on the company's website. You can find six pages of word contests there, and vote for your favorite suggestions if you're so inclined!

Of course, a few loanwords occasionally slip through the cracks and enter the language anyway. Some are very old borrowings from Danish, vestiges of a bygone time when Iceland was under Denemark's dominion. But some are very new, having snuck in through the back door that is slang. Today's word is one of those recent neologisms-- að gúgla. It means "to google."

Að gúgla is obviously just the company name "Google" with an Icelandicized spelling and an -a suffix to mark it as a verb. Many other languages do the exact same sort of thing, as can be seen in this article over at the Atlantic Wire, which features the verb "to google" in over 20 languages (do note, however, that some of those "verbs" are actually nouns). In every case the word is borrowed directly from the company name, which, of course, makes perfect sense.

Verbs in Icelandic, as many frustrated learners know, can take objects in the accusative, dative, and/or genitive cases. In the case of að gúgla, there seems to be a bit of confusion, as it is sometimes found both with an accusative (ég er að gúgla það, "I am googling it") and a dative (ég er að gúgla því). It's hard to say which one is strictly correct, because it's a word that's barely a decade old and hasn't really had the chance to settle into the complex world of Icelandic grammar yet. But according to Vísindavefurinn (a fantastically informative website from which I get a lot of factoids for this blog), most people consider the dative construction to be the correct one, via analogy with the verb phrase að fletta upp ("to look up"), which also takes the dative. In fact, Vísindavefurinn notes that the expressions að fletta því upp í Google ("to look it up on Google") and að leita að því í Google ("to search for it on Google") are probably more common than að gúgla. But, personally, I think gúgla is more fun to say, so that's what I'm going to use.

WORD SUMMARY:

að gúgla (v + dat.): to google

    Present: gúgla, gúglar, gúglar
    Past: gúglaði
    Participle: gúglað

Posted in: Borrowings, New Words, The Internet, Verbs