SEATTLE — It's not often that the President of a NATO-member nation visits Western Washington, let alone during an international crisis.
But that was the case on Thursday, with the visit by Iceland President Guðni Jóhannesson, who stopped by the National Nordic Museum in Ballard.
Johannesson was the keynote speaker at a Nordic Innovation Summit, which included tech leaders from around the region, and cracked jokes about ancient Icelandic tales and how names are mispronounced in the Avengers movies.
But he used the jokes as a way to dive deeper into the importance of native language, and why countries should be on a mission to enhance it and protect it.
"There is certainly a political element to language and language policy, when you look at the conflict of Ukraine, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the argument among the leadership in Moscow is, well Ukrainian isn't really a language," he told a group of attendees. "Let the people of Ukraine decide whether Ukrainian is the language or not and you will get a different answer."
Johannesson's tour through the west coast includes stops with tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. He said, in an interview, that he's pitching them on making the Icelandic language easier to use on mobile devices and platforms.
"We want to make sure in our digital ages, all our gadgets including our phones have Icelandic. So we can ask Siri, Alexa and others, all we need to know in Icelandic because otherwise, our language will not thrive."
He continued, "This world can only move in the right direction if we advance diversity, if we allow cultures to thrive and we can only do that if we can speak a multitude of languages."
The President of Iceland, a small island nation in the North Atlantic of just 350,000 people, also said he welcomed the addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO. The latter shares an 830-mile-long border with Russia.
However, on Thursday, Turkey said it objected to the addition. NATO's chief said he was confident the issues could be overcome soon, as did Johannesson while standing in Seattle.
"Iceland supports the decisions made by Sweden and Finland and the Nordic region sticks together," he told KING5. "We'll have to see how things develop, but the main point from an Icelandic point of view is we back the decisions made in Stockholm and Helsinki."
Johannesson, who shared a stage with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an Arctic Summit in 2019, also made his country's opinion clear.
"We fully support Ukraine as we have from the start and we want an end to the aggression," he told KING5.