Pronunciation of Icelandic phonemes

The Icelandic pronunciation is surprisingly difficult. In the following review, you will find simplified rules of pronunciation of vowels and consonants as well as the list of Icelandic phonemes. If you want to know the rules in more detail, I recommend you the book of Indriði Gíslason and Höskuldur Þráinsson: Handbók um íslenskan framburð. Reykjavík. Rannsóknarstofnun Kennaraháskóla Íslands, 2000.

For generation of pronunciation in IPA transcription, we use a script which includes more than 800 rules of pronunciation presented in Handbók um íslenskan framburð. You can search an IPA transcription of any word or word form (e.g. datt - 1st person singular of the past tense of the verb “detta”) or words that are not included in the Dictionary (e.g. Eyjafjallajökull).

For more information on Icelandic phonology, visit on Wikipedia

The table presents information on pronunciation in the following order:

1. letter
2. information on position of the letter (e.g. at the beginning of a word etc.)
3. phonetic transcription of pronunciation in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)
4. simplified phonetic transcription with notes for users
5. example of pronunciation of the phoneme in a word (by clicking on the word, you visit its entry in the Icelandic-Czech Students' Dictionary where you can listen to pronunciation recorded by native speaker)
6. phonetic transcription of the word from the example
7. example translated into Czech