Leadership Quote by Vigdís Finnbogadóttir

There is a quiet urgency in Finnbogadottir's choice of imagery: "shouting in the wilderness" frames language preservation not as polite cultural policy but as a lonely, almost prophetic act carried out against indifference. It also disarms the listener. She refuses the romance of the solitary guardian and immediately widens the frame: "I am not the only one". That pivot is political craft. A president speaks most effectively when she can turn personal concern into collective mandate, and Finnbogadottir does it in a single breath.

The line "Us Icelanders are all a bit worried" is equally strategic. "A bit" softens what is, for a small language community, an existential fear. It lets her name anxiety without sounding alarmist or xenophobic, especially in a late-20th-century context when globalization, mass media, and English-language cultural dominance made "small" languages newly vulnerable. The subtext is that the threat is not an invading army but a slow erosion: imported vocabulary, entertainment pipelines, the prestige economy of English in science and business.

Calling the language "the treasure of our identity" is more than national pride. It asserts that identity is not merely bloodline or geography but something practiced daily: speaking, reading, teaching, translating. For a nation famous for medieval sagas and a near-unbroken literary tradition, the phrase quietly implies stewardship. If the language is a treasure, it can be spent badly, hoarded sentimentally, or invested so it survives the next generation. Finnbogadottir is arguing for the last option, in the calm, inclusive register that makes cultural defense sound like civic common sense.