V2 rule
The V2 rule, also known as the verb-second rule, is one of the fundamentals of word order in Icelandic. Simply put, it goes like this:
The verb must always be the second element in the sentence.
Basic sentences
If there’s only one rule about word order in Icelandic that you learn, make it this. Let’s take some basic sentences:
Ég ætla í sund í dag.
Veðrið er oft slæmt í Reykjavík.
Maður hellir svo rjóma út í sósuna.
Here, the verb is shown in bold and is happily in second position in each sentence. All of these sentences follow the default subject–verb–object (SVO) word order of Icelandic.
Often though, sentences don’t actually start with the subject. Remember, SVO is the default word order, but not the only one. Often, you’ll want to start a sentence with some kind of ⏰ time phrase, 🏡 location, or 🤙 short adverb. In those cases, we need to do some shuffling around, a process known as inversion:
Í dag ætla ég í sund.
Í Reykjavík er veðrið oft slæmt.
Svo hellir maður rjóma út í sósuna.
So what’s happened here? We’ve moved the adverb phrases to the start of the sentence, in this case í dag, í Reykjavík and svo. The verb has to remain in second position, so that means we move the subject so that it comes right after the verb. You can think of the adverb phrase as “triggering” the inversion.
A good analogy is to think of the verb as the sun at the centre of the solar system, with all the other elements of the sentence orbiting around it like planets. ☀️🪐
Complex sentences
Inversion also occurs in much longer sentences that ↪️ start with a subordinate clause:
Áður en ég fer langar mig að spjalla aðeins við þig.
Án þess að pæla neitt í því ákvað ég að negla mér í nýjan bíl.
Það sem kom vísindamönnum og öðrum sérfræðingum hvað mest á óvart var magn kviku sem lá undir yfirborðinu.
No matter how long it is, the whole subordinate clause occupies the first position in the sentence here, causing inversion.
One way to recognise this kind of sentence structure is to think about where you’d place a comma (probably after fer). Icelandic doesn’t actually use commas here, but if you’re used to English punctuation rules this can be a helpful tactic to try and decipher complex sentences.