thumb|Faroe Islands stamp honoring Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb
Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb (, ; March 25, 1819 – April 8, 1909)
Faroese language
At one point, the language spoken in the Faroe Islands was Old West Norse, which Norwegian settlers had brought with them. Between the 9th and the 15th centuries, a distinct Faroese language evolved, although it was still intelligible to speakers of Old West Norse. It would have been closely related to the Norn language of Orkney and Shetland. However, for some 300 years until the 19th century, under the dual kingdom of Denmark–Norway, Danish was the language of religion, education, and administration in the Faroe Islands. It was etymological, with the vowels based on written Icelandic, rather than phonetically descriptive (as in, for example, Welsh). For instance, the letter eth (Ð ð) has no phonemes attached to it. Hammershaimb's orthography met with some opposition for its complexity. In 1889, Jakob Jakobsen proposed modifying Hammershaimb's system to bring it closer to the spoken language, but a committee charged with considering the proposal in 1895 advocated only minor revisions, and the bulk of Hammershaimb's orthography remained in force.