I hope readers of this blog got a laugh out of the cartoons I posted. I hope they got a bigger laugh at my lame attempts to translate the captions under the cartoons.

I used Google Translate and Zoega’s Icelandic dictionary but I have no background in the Icelandic language. My great grandparents and my Icelandic grandparents spoke, read and wrote Icelandic. My English great grandfather, my Irish grandparents, did not speak Icelandic. This is the way of an immigrant, multi-cultural country like Canada.

When I was a boy in the 1940s, Icelandic was still spoken in homes, in stores, at social occasions. By the time my great aunts and uncles started dying in the 70s and 80s, Icelandic was mostly a kitchen language, spoken over coffee with relatives or other people with a strong Icelandic background. Today, a small group meets at Amma