Which, like most Icelandic peculiarities, is adorable, but doesn’t scale well, especially with the pool of available names being restricted by the Naming Committee (in Iceland, it is illegal to give a child a name that is not on a list of approved names). With under 400,000 people in the country, and almost no family names, Icelandic phone directories apparently list people’s nicknames as well, so you don’t call the wrong Gunnlaugur Þóraresson by mistake.
Nicknames are not listed, but profession is. However, I find claims of it “not scaling well” to be strange given there are three million “Smiths” in the US and most of which are entirely unrelated.
Also, you can ask the committee to add new names, and they do let quite a few weird ones enter every month.
Icelandic patronyms like to have a word. You can have a 4 person family and nobody has the same “last name”
Which, like most Icelandic peculiarities, is adorable, but doesn’t scale well, especially with the pool of available names being restricted by the Naming Committee (in Iceland, it is illegal to give a child a name that is not on a list of approved names). With under 400,000 people in the country, and almost no family names, Icelandic phone directories apparently list people’s nicknames as well, so you don’t call the wrong Gunnlaugur Þóraresson by mistake.
Nicknames are not listed, but profession is. However, I find claims of it “not scaling well” to be strange given there are three million “Smiths” in the US and most of which are entirely unrelated.
Also, you can ask the committee to add new names, and they do let quite a few weird ones enter every month.