One of the Icelandic courses I’m doing on Memrise was made especially for people going to the Polyglot Conference in Reykjavik at the end of October.

Today’s lesson included the phrase “Hefur þú tekið þátt í Ráðstefnu fjöltyngdra einstaklinga?”, which means “Have you been to a Polyglot Conference?”, or literally “Have you taken part in a conference of multilingual individuals?”. Quite a mouthful!

• Ráðstefna means conference, from ráð (advice, counsel, plan, council) & stefna (direction, course, strategy, policy, movement, convention, conference).
• Fjöltyngdra is from fjöltyngdur (multilingual, polyglot), from fjöl- (many, multi, poly) & tyngdur (tongued, lingual), from tunga (tongue).
• Einstaklinga is from einstaklingur (individual, person)

Other Icelandic phrases I’ve learnt from this course, and other courses, are slightly easier to remember and say. For example, “Hvaða tungumál talar þú?” (Which languages do you speak?”).

That’s one that’s easy to ask, but more difficult to answer. The way I answer it depends on the context. At a polyglot event, I’ll go into details about the languages I speak and how well I speak them. Elsewhere I just say something like, “I speak 5 languages fluently, more or less”, or “I speak 11 languages well or fairly well”.

In Icelandic I think I could say “Ég tala fimm tungumál, meira eða minna” (I speak five languages, more or less”) – not sure how to add fluently (fljótt).