What language is spoken in Reykjavik?

Icelandic has drifted so little since the 13th-century sagas that a Reykjavík teenager can read Snorri Sturluson with a few footnotes, and you will need almost none of it. Icelanders start English in primary school, and American shows on RÚV are subtitled rather than dubbed, so the woman selling lopapeysa sweaters on Skólavörðustígur and the bus driver at BSÍ terminal both switch to English after your first word. There is one twist first-timers miss. Many service staff in 101 Reykjavík are Polish, Lithuanian or Spanish speakers, and Polish speakers are currently the largest immigrant group in Iceland. Your carefully practised 'góðan daginn' at a Laugavegur café may get a polite blank look, followed by English, and that is normal, not a snub.

Pronunciation is the one place where English speakers come unstuck, and it matters for buses and taxis. The double l in Icelandic sounds like 'tl', so Hallgrímskirkja comes out close to HATL-greems-kirk-ya, and Laugavegur is LOY-ga-vay-gur. The letter þ is the 'th' in 'thin', while ð is the softer 'th' in 'this'. Even Keflavík gets bent, with the 'fl' landing nearer to 'pl'. We'd screenshot the spelling of your guesthouse street before you land: on a Strætó bus, with the doors hissing open and a 40 km/h wind off Faxaflói bay, showing the driver a phone screen beats any amount of practised vowels.

Menus are where a little Icelandic pays off fastest. At Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur on Tryggvagata, order 'eina með öllu' and you get a lamb-blend hot dog under raw onion, crisp fried onion, sweet brown pylsusinnep mustard and remoulade, for under 1,000 ISK (about US$8 at 121 krónur to the dollar). Plokkfiskur is a buttery mash of cod and potato, usually served with dark, slightly sweet rúgbrauð rye bread. Kjötsúpa is a lamb and root-vegetable soup that tends to taste better on a 7°C October afternoon than it sounds. Harðfiskur is wind-dried fish with the texture of balsa wood, and locals smear it with salted butter. Hákarl, the fermented shark, smells like a cleaning cupboard. Most visitors try one cube at Kolaportið flea market and stop there.

Social Icelandic follows a few rules of its own. Everyone goes by first name, including the prime minister, because surnames are patronymics like Jónsdóttir or Magnússon, and the phone directory has long been sorted by first name. Raise a glass with 'skál' at Kaffibarinn on Bergstaðastræti. When you leave a dinner, say 'takk fyrir mig', which means roughly 'thanks for having me'. You may hear a sharp intake of breath that sounds like 'já' or 'jæja' said backwards: that is the ingressive yes, and in Icelandic it signals agreement, not shock. Phone calls in Reykjavík tend to end with a doubled 'bless bless'.