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The musician discusses working at the national broadcaster, her podcast, and learning Icelandic

Reykjavík is no stranger to Jelena Ćirić’s voice; she’s been nominated at the Kraumur Music Awards and Icelandic Music Awards, and won Icelandic Folk Album of the Year at the latter in 2021. Now, however, Icelanders are hearing Jelena’s voice in a different context: listening to her as a radio presenter on the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service (RÚV).   

“I was really happy to get the job. And when I started, it was a big learning process, like a big learning curve, because it’s a really technical job,” Jelena explains. In this role, she stewards the entire live broadcast, not just announcing the next programmes, but switching to the RÚV newsroom or the Icelandic Met Office when it’s time, choosing the music that plays between programmes, presenting music, and more.  

She began the job this spring, and in September, RÚV’s Kastljós released a feature spotlighting her work and experience at RÚV so far. RÚV has never had a non-native speaker of Icelandic hold this job before; Jelena is the first. Jelena was born in Serbia, then moved to Canada when she was very young; she studied in Spain, worked in Mexico, and then moved to Iceland in 2016. “In the beginning, there was maybe this added pressure of, ‘I’m the first foreign person to do this,’” she says. When Kastljós shared the interview with Jelena, the response was overwhelmingly positive; people commended her work, complimented her Icelandic, and shared excitement for RÚV. 

Stories of our grandparents

Unrelated to her day job at RÚV, Jelena also presented the five-chapter podcast Hverra manna (coming from the Icelandic phrase “Hverra manna ert þú?,” a common way to ask someone about their family lineage), which she pitched for one of RÚV’s annual Hugmyndadagar, or “Idea Days.” Her show explores genealogy and family history for those with grandparents not born in Iceland, and the show had both interviewees who were raised in Iceland and those not born in Iceland themselves.   

“I think a lot of Icelanders don’t realise how remarkable it is to have all these amazing sources on family history, which in so many other countries, because of war or poverty, just don’t exist. Here, people can just go on a website and look up their ancestors and how they’re related to any other person out there on the street. But I find that that sort of interest kind of stops at the border,” Jelena states. “I wanted to encourage people to still ask [Hverra manna ert þú?], even if somebody is of foreign origin, because those stories are just as valid and just as interesting.” 

The interviewees share memories, describe their grandparents, and explain the role they had in their lives. “What I found really interesting was the sort of common threads that would come up between stories, where people had a similar experience, they would sleep with their grandmother in her bed, or just the same sort of little anecdotes,” Jelena notes.   

Over the show’s five episodes, Jelena speaks with author Maó Alheimsdóttir, musician José Luis Alexander Anderson Esquivel, librarian Martyna Daniel, teacher and writer Derek Terell Allen, and others. “Another thing that was really important to me in producing Hverra manna was to make space for voices with accents and for all sorts of Icelandic. Some of my interviewees, they had never done an interview in Icelandic before,” Jelena explains.  

Learning the language 

In Jelena’s interview with Kastljós, a point she emphasised was that it “should not be newsworthy” that she can speak Icelandic well after her nine years living in the country. Returning to that point, she explains, “Icelanders love to say that Icelandic is really hard, and I just completely disagree with that. I just think what’s hard about learning Icelandic is not the language itself, it’s the lack of resources.” She continues, “It’s not the fact that it has cases — we could learn all of that if we had the resources. I really don’t want to live in a society where only people with privilege have access to the main language, and I don’t think anybody else really wants to, if they think about it properly.” 

“If we heard diverse voices a little bit more and just got used to hearing them, we would open a lot of doors for people into the language. Language learners need these positive experiences, and for people to have patience with us. Honestly, I still remember the faces of people who were really patient with me, you know, strangers or bartenders or whatever, when I was learning Icelandic,” she adds.  

“I think it’s super positive for RÚV to have diverse voices. I mean, that’s part of their mandate, and we all pay our tax dollars to this service, which is a public service,” Jelena concludes. “It should also reflect immigrants and not just native-born Icelanders.” 

Jelena Ćirić is a presenter at RÚV, and a journalist, translator, and musician. Tune into Rás 1 and you may hear her voice, or visit RÚV’s website to find all episodes of the podcast Hverra manna. And, if you’re curious about her music, she’ll be holding a concert at Mengi on October 18.