MBL: Icelandic Name Committee says no to Zelda and Lucifer

NordenBladet – Iceland’s Naming Committee* met on the sixth of November to review another batch of contending names for their approval or rejection, MBL.is reports, and some names fared better than others.

New first names now added to the Icelandic lexicon include Ilíes, Char­les, Rey, Damí­en, Heiðbjart­ur, Marzell­íus, Kristólín and Mikki. But not everyone was so lucky.

Two of the first names rejected were Lucifer and Zelda. In their reasoning for the decision regarding Lucifer, they cited the use of the letter C, which does not appear in the Icelandic alphabet, but does make one wonder why Charles then was accepted. The committee believed furthermore that Lucifer is another name for Satan, and could therefore make the early life of a child with this name a target for bullying.

Zelda was rejected because the committee did not believe the name had significant historical precedence, despite at least two Icelandic women bearing this name, the older of whom born in 2009. They also cited Icelandic having dropped the use of the letter Z some decades ago—again, despite the fact that one of the names amongst those approved also uses a Z.

The Naming Committee is itself a controversial institution, and many prominent Icelanders—amongst them, writer and former Reykjavík mayor Jón Gnarr and former Minister of Justice Ólöf Nordal—have seen the committee as an antiquated institution that is no longer necessary. The committee’s mandate is to ensure that new Icelandic names abide Icelandic grammar, have historical precedent, and are not harmful to a child.

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* The Icelandic Naming Committee (Icelandic: Mannanafnanefnd; pronounced [ˈmanːaˌnapnaˌnɛmt])—also known in English as the Personal Names Committee—maintains an official register of approved Icelandic given names and governs the introduction of new given names into Icelandic culture.

The Naming Committee was established in 1991 to determine whether new given names not previously used in Iceland are suitable for integration into the country’s language and culture. The committee comprises three appointees who serve for four years, appointed by the Minister of Justice—one to be nominated by the Icelandic Language Committee, one by the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Iceland, and one by the university’s Faculty of Law.

A name not already on the official list of approved names must be submitted to the naming committee for approval. A new name is considered for its compatibility with Icelandic tradition and for the likelihood that it might cause the bearer embarrassment. Under Article 5 of the Personal Names Act, names must be compatible with Icelandic grammar (in which all nouns, including proper names, have grammatical gender and change their forms in an orderly fashion according to the language’s case system). Names must also contain only letters occurring in the Icelandic alphabet, and with only occasional exceptions, a name’s grammatical gender previously had to match the sex of the person bearing the name.

In 2019, changes were announced to the laws governing names. Given names will no longer be restricted by gender. Moreover, Icelanders who are officially registered with non-binary gender will be permitted to use the patro/matronymic suffix -bur (“child”) instead of -son or -dóttir.

As of the end of 2012, the Personal Names Register (Mannanafnaskrá) contained 1,712 male names and 1,853 female names.