Danish
Language · official in 2 countries and territories
Stød, a catch of creaky voice, is all that separates bønder, peasants, from bønner, beans. Dansk is a North Germanic language descended from Old East Norse, with 27 distinct vowels and a spelling that has barely moved since the 16th century. It is official in 2 territories on record, Denmark and the Faroe Islands.
The language on record
- Own name
- dansk
- ISO 639-1
- DA
- ISO 639-3
- DAN
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- North Germanic
- Official in
- 2 countries
Where Danish is official
Denmark, where Danish is the national language, and the Faroe Islands, a self-governing part of the Danish Realm where it is official beside Faroese.
Official beside Danish
About Danish
How Copenhagen speech became the standard
Until the 16th century Danish was a continuum of dialects from Southern Jutland and Schleswig to Scania, without a standard. The Reformation of 1536 made it the language of religion, and with the printing press a standard grew on the dialect of Copenhagen. German and Latin still led as written languages well into the 17th century. The first Danish grammar written in Danish, Peder Syv's Den Danske Sprog-Kunst, came out in 1685.
After territorial losses to Germany and Sweden, a nationalist movement took up the language as a mark of identity. The traditional dialects have now all but disappeared, and the sharpest differences run between generations.
When did Danish drop capital nouns
The spelling reform of 1948 dropped the German-influenced rule of capitalising nouns and brought in å, already used in Norwegian and Swedish, in place of aa. The alphabet ends with æ, ø and å, in that order. Some towns kept the old spelling: Aalborg and Aabenraa still write Aa by decision of their municipalities. Dansk Sprognævn has been the official language council since 1955.
Where Danish stands in the realm
In the Faroe Islands it is one of two official languages with Faroese, and a Faroese variant of Danish is known as Gøtudanskt. It was co-official in Greenland until 2009 and remains a lingua franca there; Greenlandic schools made it compulsory in 1928. South of the border it has minority status in Southern Schleswig, where Danes stayed on after the Schleswig referendum of 1920.
Common questions
Questions about Danish
Can Danes understand Norwegians and Swedes?
Spoken Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are largely mutually intelligible, though how well depends on region and speaker, since spoken Danish differs markedly from the other two. Icelandic and Faroese are not intelligible to them.
Which English words come from Danish?
Old East Norse gave English knife, from kniv, and egg, from æg.
Why is Danish thought hard to learn?
Its vowels and its weakly pronounced consonants set it apart from its neighbours, and some evidence shows that children acquire its sound distinctions more slowly than those of other languages.