Faroese (pronounces as /?f??ro??i?z/ or /?f?ro??i?z/) is the mother tongue for over 70 thousand people, mostly concentrated on the Faroe Islands and Denmark. Just as Icelandic (see our entry), it is a Germanic language derived from Old Norse. A bit of history Old Norse was still the language on the Islands at the beginning of the 10th century. However, the influx of Irish, Orkney and Shetland settlers in the coming years began to affect the language. Even contemporary Faroese has a significant number of words that have a clear Celtic origin. At the end of 14th century, it stopped being a written language as a result of a union with Denmark. For almost 300 years, Faroese was used only in its spoken forms in arts and daily interactions. The first decades of 19th century brought a change as first publications with Faroese started to appear. The first one was the
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