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{{Infobox Language|name=Danish|nativename=dansk|states=Denmark, Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, Germany (Southern Schleswig)]|fam3=North Germanic language|fam4=East Scandinavian|nation=

Nordic Council ("Danish Language Committee")|iso1=da|iso2=dan|iso3=dan-->

Danish (dansk) is one of the [North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages), a sub-group of the Germanic languages branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, where it holds the status of minority language. Danish also holds official status and is a mandatory subject in school in the Danish territories of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, which now enjoy limited autonomy. In Iceland and Faroe Islands, Danish is, alongside English, a compulsory foreign language taught in schools. In North America and South America there are Danish language communities in Argentina, the United States and Canada.

Classification and related languages Danish, together with Swedish language, derives from the East Nordic dialect group, while Norwegian language is classified as a West Nordic language together with Faroese language and Icelandic language. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Scandinavian in two groups: Southern Scandinavian, which is Danish, and Northern Scandinavian, consisting of Norwegian and Swedish. Icelandic and Faroese is placed in a separate Insular Scandinavian. Written Danish and Norwegian Bokmål are particularly close, though the phonology and prosody make them differ somewhat. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can understand the others, though studies have shown that speakers of Norwegian generally understand both Danish and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand each other. Both Swedes and Danes also understand Norwegian better than they understand each other's languages.

Due to its proximity with German, Fan Noli, linguist and translator of Ibsen’s works, said that “those who know German can learn Danish in fifteen days”.Spahiu, Avni. Noli: jeta në Amerikë. Tirana: Toena, 2007. 196.

History In the 8th century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, Proto-Norse, had undergone some changes and evolved into Old Norse. This language began to undergo new changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, which resulted in the appearance of two similar dialects, Old West Norse (Norway and Iceland) and Old East Norse (Denmark and Sweden).

Old East Norse is in Sweden called Runic Swedish and in east Denmark Runic Danish, but until the 12th century, the dialect was roughly the same in the two countries. The dialects are called runic due to the fact that the main body of text appears in the runic alphabet. Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the Younger Futhark alphabet, which only had 16 letters. Due to the limited number of runes, some runes were used for a range of phonemes, such as the rune for the vowel u which was also used for the vowels o, ø and y, and the rune for i which was also used for e.

A change that separated Old East Norse (Runic Swedish/Danish) from Old West Norse was the change of the diphthong æi (Old West Norse ei) to the monophthong e, as in stæin to sten. This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read stain and the later stin. There was also a change of au as in dauðr into ø as in døðr. This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from tauþr into tuþr. Moreover, the øy (Old West Norse ey) diphthong changed into ø as well, as in the Old Norse word for "island".

Some famous authors of works in Danish are existentialism philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, prolific fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen, and playwright Ludvig Holberg. Three 20th century Danish authors have become Nobel Prize laureates in Nobel Prize in Literature: Karl Adolph Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan (joint recipients in 1917) and Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (awarded 1944).

Danish was once widely spoken in the northeast counties of England. Many Danish derived words such as gate (gade) for street, still survive in Yorkshire and other parts of eastern England colonized by Danish Vikings. The city of York was once the Danish settlement of Jorvik.

The first printed book in Danish dates from 1495. The first complete translation of the Bible in Danish was published in 1550.

Geographical distribution Danish is the national language of Denmark, one of two official languages of Greenland (the other is Greenlandic language), and one of two official languages of the Faroe Islands (the other is Faroese language). In addition, there is a small community of Danish speakers in Southern Schleswig, the portion of Germany bordering Denmark, where it is an officially recognized regional language, just as German language is north of the border. Furthermore, Danish is one of the official languages of the European Union and one of the working languages of the Nordic Council. Under the Nordic Language Convention, citizens of the Nordic countries speaking Danish have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable to any interpretation or translation costs. Konvention mellan Sverige, Danmark, Finland, Island och Norge om nordiska medborgares rätt att använda sitt eget språk i annat nordiskt land, Nordic Council website. Retrieved on April 25, 2007. 20th anniversary of the Nordic Language Convention, Nordic news, February 22, 2007. Retrieved on April 25, 2007.

There is no law stipulating an official language for Denmark, making Danish the de facto language only. The Code of Civil Procedure does, however, lay down Danish as the language of the courts. Since 1997 public authorities have been obliged to observe the official spelling by way of the Orthography Law.

Dialects

Standard Danish (rigsdansk) is the language based on dialects spoken in and around the capital of Copenhagen. Unlike Swedish and Norwegian, Danish does not have more than one regional speech norm. More than 25% of all Danish speakers live in the metropolitan area and most government agencies, institutions and major businesses keep their main offices in Copenhagen, something that has resulted in a very homogeneous national speech norm. In contrast, though Oslo (Norway) and Stockholm (Sweden) are quite dominant in terms of speech standards, cities like Bergen, Norway, Gothenburg and the Malmö-Lund region are large and influential enough to create secondary regional norms, making the standard language more varied than is the case with Danish. The general agreement is that Standard Danish is based on a form of Copenhagen dialect, but the specific norm is, as with most language norms, difficult to pinpoint for both laypeople and scholars. Historically Standard Danish emerged as a compromise between the dialect of Zealand and Scania. The first layers of it can be seen in east Danish provincial law texts such as Scanian Law, just as we can recognize west Danish in laws from the same ages in Jyske Lov.

Despite the relative cultural monopoly of the capital and the centralised government, the divided geography of the country allowed distinct rural dialects to flourish during the centuries. Such "genuine" dialects were formerly spoken by a vast majority of the population, but have declined much since the 1960s. They still exist in communities out on the countryside, but most speakers in these areas generally speak a regionalized form of Standard Danish, when speaking with one who speaks to them in that same standard. Usually an adaptation of the local dialect to rigsdansk is spoken, though code-switching between the standard-like norm and a distinct dialect is common.

Danish is divided into three distinct dialect groups:

Eastern Danish (østdansk), including the Bornholmsk, Scanian (linguistics) and Halland dialects
Island Danish (ømål or ødansk), including dialects of Zealand, Funen, Lolland, Falster, and Møn
Jutlandic (jysk), further divided in North, East, West and South Jutlandic

Historically, Eastern Danish includes what is occasionally considered Southern Swedish dialects. The background for this lies in the loss of the originally Danish provinces Blekinge, Halland and Scania (region) to Sweden in 1658. The island Bornholm in the Baltic also belongs to this group, but remained Danish. A few generations ago, the classical dialects spoken in the southern Swedish provinces could still be argued to be more Eastern Danish than Swedish, being similar to the dialect of Bornholm. Today influx of Standard Swedish vocabulary has generally meant that Scanian and Bornholmish are closer to the modern national standards than to each other. The Bornholm dialect has also maintained to this day many ancient features, such as a distinction between three grammatical genders, which the central Island Danish dialects gave up during the 20th Century. Standard Danish has two genders, and Western Jutlandic only one, similar to English.

Today, Standard Danish is most similar to the Island Danish dialect group.

Sound system The sound system of Danish is in many ways unique among the world's languages. It is quite prone to considerable reduction and assimilation (linguistics) of both consonants and vowels even in very formal standard language. A rare feature is the presence of a prosodic feature called stød in Danish (lit. "push; thrust"). This is a form of laryngealization or creaky voice, only occasionally realized as a full glottal stop (especially in emphatic pronunciation). It can be the only distinguishing feature between certain words, thus creating minimal pairs (e.g. bønder "peasants" with stød vs. bønner "beans" without). The distribution of stød in the lexicon is clearly related to the distribution of the common Scandinavian tone (linguistics) word accents found in most dialects of Norwegian language and Swedish language, including the national standard languages. Most linguists today believe that stød is a development of the word accents, rather than the other way round. Some have theorized it emerged from the overwhelming influence of Low German in medieval times, having flattened the originally Nordic melodic accent, but stød is absent in most southern Danish dialects where Low German impact would have been the greatest. Stød generally occurs in words that have "accent 1" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were monosyllabic in Old Norse, while no-stød occurs in words that have "accent 2" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were polysyllabic in Old Norse.

Unlike the neighboring Continental Scandinavian languages, the prosody of Danish does not have phonemic pitch. stress (linguistics) is phonemic and distinguishes wordssuch as billigst "cheapest" and bilist "car driver".

Vowels {| border="2" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" style="margin: 1em 1em 1em 0; background: #f9f9f9; border: 1px #aaa solid; border-collapse: collapse;"|-| rowspan="2" |! colspan="2" | Front vowel! rowspan="2" | Central vowel! colspan="2" | Back vowel|- align=center| style="font-size: x-small"|unrounded| style="font-size: x-small"|rounded| style="font-size: x-small"|unrounded| style="font-size: x-small"|rounded|- align=center|Close vowel
(high)| | ||| |- align=center|Close-mid vowel| | ||| |- align=center|Mid vowel||| |||- align=center|Open-mid vowel||||||- align=center| Open vowel
(low)||||||}Modern Standard Danish has 14 vowel phonemes. All but two of these vowels may be either long and short, with the exceptions being schwa and . The long and short realizations often differ in vowel#Articulation and there are several allophones that differ if they occur together with an . For example, is lowered when it occurs either before or after and is pronounced when it's long.

Consonants {| border="2" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" style="margin: 1em 1em 1em 0; background: #f9f9f9; border: 1px #aaa solid; border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center; font-size: 105%;"|-!! colspan="2" | Bilabial! colspan="2" ]-
labiodental! colspan="2" | Alveolar consonant! colspan="2" | Alveolar consonant-
palatal! colspan="2" ]! colspan="2" | Velar consonant! colspan="2" | Uvular-
Pharyngeal consonant! colspan="2" | glottal consonant|-|Plosives]| colspan="2" | | colspan="2" || colspan="2" | | colspan="2" || colspan="2" || colspan="2" | | colspan="2" || colspan="2" ||-|Fricatives]s| colspan="2" || colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" || colspan="2" | | colspan="2" || colspan="2" | | colspan="2" ||-| Lateral consonant| colspan="2" || colspan="2" || colspan="2" || colspan="2" || colspan="2" | | colspan="2" || colspan="2" || colspan="2" ||}

are phonation in all contexts. often have slight frication, but are usually pronounced as approximants. The distinction between , / and is only made in the beginning of a word or at the beginning of a stressed syllable. Hence lappe and labbe are rendered . The combination of is realized as a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative, , making it possible to postulate a tentative -phoneme in Danish. can be described as "tautosyllabic", meaning that it take the form of either a phonetic consonant or vowel. At the beginning of a word, it is pronounced as a voiced uvular fricative, , but in most other positions it is either realised as a non-syllabic near-open central vowel, (which is almost identical to how /r/ is often pronounced in German language) or simply coalesces with the preceding vowel. The phenomenon is also comparable to non-rhotic pronunciations of English.

Grammar The infinitive forms of Danish verbs end in a vowel, which in almost all cases is the letter e. Verbs are conjugated according to Grammatical tense, but otherwise do not vary according to Grammatical person or Grammatical number. For example the present tense form of the Danish infinitive verb spise ("to eat") is spiser; this form is the same regardless of whether the subject is in the first, second, or third person, or whether it is singular or plural. This extreme ease of conjugating verbs is made up for by the many irregular verbs in the language.

Standard Danish nouns fall into only two grammatical genders: common and neuter, while some dialects still often have masculine, feminine and neuter. West Jutlandic has only one gender, but has developed a distinction between countable and uncountable material (den træ "the tree", det træ, "the wood"). This is sometime observed in Standard Danish as well (usually det mælk although strictly grammatically it should be den mælk "that milk"). While the majority of Danish nouns (ca. 75%) have the common gender, and neuter is often used for inanimate objects, the genders of nouns are not generally predictable and must in most cases be memorized. A distinctive feature of the Scandinavian languages, including Danish, is an enclitic definite article.To demonstrate: The common gender word "a man" (indefinite) is en mand but "the man" (definite) is manden. The neuter equivalent would be "a house" (indefinite) et hus, "the house" (definite) huset. Even though the definite and indefinite articles have separate origins, they have become homographs in Danish. In the plural s the definite article is -(e)(r)ne, and the indefinite article is -e(r). The enclitic article is not used when an adjective is added to the noun; here the demonstrative pronoun is used instead: den store mand "the big man", "the big house", det store hus.

Like most Germanic languages, Danish joins compound nouns. The example kvindehåndboldlandsholdet, "the female handball national team", illustrates that it does so to a significantly higher degree than English language. In some cases, nouns are joined with an extra s, like landsmand (from land, "country", and mand, "man", meaning "compatriot"), but landmand (from same roots, meaning "farmer"). Some words are joined with an extra e, like gæstebog (from gæst and bog, meaning "guest book").

Vocabulary Danish words are largely derived from the Old Norse language, with new words formed by compounding. A large percentage of Danish words, however, hail from Middle Low German (for example, betale = to pay, måske = maybe). Later on, German language and French language and now English language have superseded Low German influence - although many old Nordic words remain, they fall out of favor when the new come in, such as can be seen with æde (to eat) which became less common when the German spise came into fashion. Because English and Danish are related languages, many common words are very similar in the two languages. For example, the following Danish words are easily recognizable in their written form to English speakers: have, over, under, for, give, flag, salt, kat. When pronounced, these words sound quite different from their English equivalents, due to the Great Vowel Shift of English. In addition, the word by, meaning "village" or "town", occurs in several English placenames, such as Whitby and Selby, as remnants of the Viking occupation.

===Numerals===In Danish numerals, the tens and units digits of numbers above 20 are reversed when spoken or written, such that 21 is rendered enogtyve, i.e. one and twenty. This is similar to German language, Dutch language (and Afrikaans language) and also to some variants of Bokmål Norwegian (which is itself heavily influenced by Danish).

The numeral halvanden means 1.5 (literally "half second"). The numerals halvtredje (2.5) and halvfjerde (3.5), likewise constructed by "overcounting", are obsolete, but still implicitly used in the vigesimal system described below. Similarly, the time halv tre, literally "half three", is half past two.

Danish numerals from 50 to 90 are (like the French language numerals 70, 80 and 90) based on a vigesimal system, not shared with the other Scandinavian languages. This means that the Twenty is used as a base number: Tres (short for tre-sinds-tyve) means 3 times 20, that is 60. Similarly, halvtreds (short for halvtredje-sinds-tyve) means 2.5 times 20, that is 50. The ending sindstyve is archaic in cardinal numbers, but still used in ordinal numbers. Thus, "fifty-two" is usually rendered to-og-halvtreds, whereas "fifty-second" is to-og-halvtredsindstyvende.

For large numbers (one billion or larger), Danish uses the Long and short scales, so that e.g. one billion is called milliard, and one trillion is called billion.

==Writing system==

The oldest preserved examples of written Danish (from the Iron and Viking Ages) are in the Runic alphabet. The introduction of Christianity also brought the Latin alphabet to Denmark, and at the end of the High Middle Ages the Runes had more or less been replaced by the Latin letters.

As in Germany, the Fraktur (typeface sub-classification) types were still commonly used in the late 19th century (until 1875, Danish children were taught to read and write the Fraktur letters in school), and most books were printed with Fraktur typesetting even in the beginning of the 20th century.

The modern Danish alphabet is similar to the English one, with three additional letters: æ, ø, and å, which come at the end of the Danish alphabet, in that order. A spelling reform in 1948 introduced the letter å, already in use in Norwegian and Swedish, into the Danish alphabet to replace the letter aa; the old usage still occurs in some personal and geographical names and old documents (for example, the name of the city of Ålborg is often spelled Aalborg). When representing the å sound, aa is treated just like å in alphabetical sorting, even though it looks like two letters. When the letters are not available (e.g., in URLs), they are replaced by ae, oe or o, and aa, respectively.

The same spelling reform changed the spelling of a few common words, such as the past tense vilde (would), kunde (could) and skulde (should), to their current forms of ville, kunne and skulle (making them identical to the infinitives in writing, as they are in speech), and did away with the practice of capitalising all nouns, which German language still does. Modern Danish and Norwegian use the same alphabet, though spelling differs somewhat.

See also

Jutlandic
South Jutlandic
Differences between Norwegian Bokmål and Standard Danish

Notes References

Hans Basbøll (2005) The Phonology of Danish ISBN 0-19-824268-9

External links

Danish course with instant audio
Collection of Danish bilingual dictionaries
Dictionary of the Danish Language
Danish grammar
Danish and Swedish with sound files including Japanese translation
Danish dialect audio samples (in Danish)
"GrammarExplorer Danish" an online Danish grammar

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