Danish language

Danish
dansk
The first page of the Jutlandic Law originally from 1241 in Codex Holmiensis, copied in 1350. The first sentence is: "Mædh logh skal land byggas" Modern orthography: "Med lov skal land bygges" English translation: "With law shall a country be built"
Pronunciation	[d̥anˀsɡ̊]
Native to	Denmark Greenland Faroe Islands Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
Native speakers	5.5 million (2012)[1]
Language family	Indo-European Germanic North Germanic East Scandinavian Continental Scandinavian Danish
Early forms	Old Norse Old East Norse Early Old Danish Late Old Danish Danish
Dialects	Bornholmian (Eastern Danish) Jutlandic South Jutlandic Insular Danish
Writing system	Latin script: Dano-Norwegian alphabet ∙ Danish orthography ∙ Danish Braille
Signed forms	Danish Sign Language
Official status
Official language in	Denmark  Faroe Islands  Nordic Council  European Union
Recognised minority language in	Greenland  Germany
Regulated by	Dansk Sprognævn (Danish Language Committee)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	da
ISO 639-2	dan
ISO 639-3	Either: dan – Insular Danish jut – Jutlandic
Glottolog	dani1284[2]
Linguasphere	5 2-AAA-bf & -ca to -cj
The Danish-speaking world:   regions where Danish is the language of the majority   regions where Danish is the language of a significant minority

Danish ⁱ/ˈdeɪnᵻʃ/ (dansk pronounced [d̥anˀsɡ̊]; dansk sprog, [ˈd̥anˀsɡ̊ ˈsb̥ʁɔʊ̯ˀ]) is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in Denmark and in the region of Southern Schleswig in northern Germany, where it has minority language status.^[3] There are also minor Danish-speaking communities in Norway, Sweden, Spain, the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina. Due to immigration and language shift in urban areas, around 15–20% of the population of Greenland speak Danish as their home language.

Along with the other North Germanic languages, Danish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples that lived in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. Danish, together with Swedish, derives from the East Norse dialect group, while the Middle Norwegian language before the influence of Danish and Norwegian Bokmål are classified as West Norse along with Faroese and Icelandic. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Danish, Norwegian and Swedish as Mainland Scandinavian while Icelandic and Faroese are classified as Insular Scandinavian.

Until the 16th century, Danish was a continuum of dialects spoken from Schleswig to Scania with no standard variety or spelling conventions. With the Protestant Reformation and the introduction of printing, a standard language was developed which was based on the educated Copenhagen dialect. It spread through use in the education system and administration though German and Latin continued to be the most important written languages well into the 17th century. Following the loss of territory to Germany and Sweden, a nationalist movement adopted the language as a token of Danish identity, and the language experienced a strong surge in use and popularity with major works of literature produced in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, traditional Danish dialects have all but disappeared, though there are regional variants of the standard language. The main differences in language are between generations, with youth language being particularly innovative.

Danish has a very large vowel inventory comprising 27 phonemically distinctive vowels,^[4] and its prosody is characterized by the distinctive phenomenon stød, a kind of laryngeal phonation type. Due to the many pronunciation differences that set apart Danish from its neighboring languages, particularly the vowels, difficult prosody and "weakly" pronounced consonants, it is sometimes considered to be a difficult language to learn and understand,^[5] and there is some evidence that small children are slower to acquire the phonological distinctions of Danish.^[6] The grammar is moderately inflective with strong (irregular) and weak (regular) conjugations and inflections. Nouns and demonstrative pronouns distinguish common and neutral gender. As in English, Danish only has remnants of a former case system, particularly in the pronouns, and it has lost all person marking on verbs. Its syntax is V2, with the finite verb always occupying the second slot in the sentence.

Classification

Danish is a Germanic language of the North Germanic branch. Other names for this group are the Nordic or Scandinavian languages. Along with Swedish, Danish descends from the Eastern dialects of the Old Norse language; Danish and Swedish are also classified as East Scandinavian or East Nordic languages.^[7][8]

Scandinavian languages are often considered a dialect continuum, where there are no sharp dividing lines between the different vernacular languages.^[7]

Like Norwegian and Swedish, Danish was significantly influenced by Low German in the Middle Ages, and has been influenced by English since the turn of the 20th century.^[7]

Danish itself can be divided into three main dialect areas: West Danish (Jutlandic), Insular Danish (including the Standard variety), and East Danish (including Bornholmian and Scanian). Under the view that Scandinavian is a dialect continuum, East Danish can be considered intermediary between Danish and Swedish, while Scanian can be considered a Swedified East Danish dialect, and Bornholmsk is its closest relative.^[7]

Mutual intelligibility

Danish is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Swedish. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can often understand the others fairly well, 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.^[9] The reason Norwegian occupies a middle position in terms of intelligibility is because of its shared border with Sweden resulting in a similarity in pronunciation, combined with the long tradition of having Danish as a written language which has led to similarities in vocabulary. ^[10] Among younger Danes, Copenhagenians are worse at understanding Swedish than Danes from the provinces, and in general younger Danes are not as good at understanding the neighboring languages as are Norwegian and Swedish youths.^[9]

History

Dǫnsk tunga: The Old Norse period

By the 8th century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, Proto-Norse, had undergone some changes and evolved into Old Norse. This language was generally called the "Danish tongue" (Dǫnsk tunga), or "Norse language" (Norrœnt mál). Norse was written in the runic alphabet, first with the elder futhark and from the 9th century with the younger futhark.

From the 7th century the common Norse language began to undergo changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, resulting in the appearance of two dialect areas, Old West Norse (Norway and Iceland) and Old East Norse (Denmark and Sweden). Most of the changes separating East Norse from West Norse started as innovations in Denmark, that spread through Scania into Sweden and by maritime contact to southern Norway.^[12] 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". This monophthongization started in Jutland and spread eastward, having spread throughout Denmark and most of Sweden by 1100.^[13]

Through Danish conquest, Old East Norse was once widely spoken in the northeast counties of England. Many words derived from Norse, such as "gate" (gade) for street, still survive in Yorkshire, the East Midlands and East Anglia, parts of eastern England colonized by Danish Vikings. The city of York was once the Viking settlement of Jorvik. Several other English words derive from Old East Norse, for example "are" (er), "knife" (kniv), "husband" (husbond), and "egg" (æg).^[14] The suffix "-by" for 'town' is common in place names in Yorkshire and the east Midlands, for example Selby, Whitby, Derby and Grimsby. The word "dale" meaning valley is common in Yorkshire and Derbyshire placenames.

Old Danish: The 11th to 16th centuries

In the medieval period Danish emerged as a separate language from Swedish. The main written language was Latin, and the few Danish language texts preserved from this period are written in the Latin alphabet, although the runic alphabet seems to have lingered in popular usage in some areas. The main text types written in this period are laws, which were formulated in the vernacular language to be accessible also to those who were not latinate. The Jutlandic Law and Scanian Law were written in vernacular Danish in the early 13th century. Beginning in 1350 Danish began to be used as a language of administration and new types of literature began to be written in the language, such as royal letters and testaments. The orthography in this period was not standardized nor was the spoken language, and the regional laws demonstrate the dialectal differences between the regions in which they were written.^[16]

Throughout this period Danish was in contact with Low German, and many Low German loans were introduced in this period.^[17] With the Protestant Reformation in 1536, Danish also became the language of religion, which sparked a new interest in using Danish as a literary language. It is also in this period that Danish begins to take on the linguistic traits that differentiate it from Swedish and Norwegian, such as the stød the voicing of many stop consonants, and the weakening of many final vowels to /e/.^[18]

The first printed book in Danish dates from 1495, the "Rimkrøniken" (Rhyming Chronicle), a history book told in rhymed verses.^[19] The first complete translation of the Bible in Danish, the Bible of Christian II translated by Christiern Pedersen was published in 1550. Pedersen's orthographic choices set the de facto standard for subsequent writing in Danish.^[20]

Early Modern Danish

Following the first Bible translation the development of Danish as a written language, and as a language of religion, administration and public discourse sped up. In the second half of the 17th century a number of grammarians elaborated grammars of Danish, first among them Rasmus Bartholin's 1657 Latin grammar De studio lingvæ danicæ; then Laurids Olufsen Kock's 1660 grammar of the Zealand dialect Introductio ad lingvam Danicam puta selandicam; and in 1685 the first Danish grammar written in Danish, Den Danske Sprog-Kunst ("The Art of the Danish Language") by Peder Syv. Significant authors from this period are Thomas Kingo, poet and psalmist, and Leonora Christina Ulfeldt, whose novel Jammersminde ("Remembered Woes") is considered a literary masterpiece. Orthography was still not standardized and the principles for doing so were vigorously discussed among Danish philologists. The grammar of Jens Pedersen Høysgaard was the first to give a detailed analysis of Danish phonology and prosody, including a description of the stød. In this period scholars were also discussing whether it was best to "write as one speaks" or to "speak as one writes", including whether archaic grammatical forms that had fallen out of use in the vernacular, such as the plural form of verbs, should be conserved in writing (i.e. han er "he is" vs. de ere "they are").

The East Danish provinces were lost to Sweden after the Treaty of Brömsebro after which they were gradually Swedified; just as Norway was politically severed from Denmark, begininnig also a gradual end of Danish influence on Norwegian (influence through the shared written standard language remained). With the introduction of absolutism in 1660, the Danish state was further integrated, and the language of the chancellery, a Zealandic variety with German and French influence, became the de facto official standard language, especially in writing - this was the original so-called rigsdansk ("Danish of the Realm"). Also beginning in the mid 18th century, the skarre-R, the uvular R sound ([ʁ]), began spreading through Denmark, probably through influence from Parisian French and German. It affected all of the areas where Danish had been influential, including all of Denmark, Southern Sweden and coastal southern Norway.^[21]

In the 18th century Danish philology was advanced by Rasmus Rask, who pioneered the disciplines of comparative and historical linguistics and wrote the first English language grammar of Danish. Literary Danish flourished with the works of Ludvig Holberg, whose plays and historical and scientific works laid the foundation for the Danish literary canon. With the Danish colonization of Greenland by Hans Egede, Danish became the administrative and religious language there, while Iceland and the Faroe Islands had the status of Danish colonies with Danish as an official language up until the mid 20th century.

Standardized national language

Following the loss of Schleswig to Germany, a sharp influx of German speakers moved into the area, eventually outnumbering the Danish speakers. The political loss of territory sparked a period of intense nationalism in Denmark, coinciding with the so-called "Golden Age" of Danish culture. Authors such as N.F.S. Grundtvig emphasized the role of language in creating national belonging. Some of the most cherished Danish language authors of this period are existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and prolific fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen.^[22] The influence of popular literary role models, together with increased requirements of education did much to strengthen the Danish language, and also started a period of homogenization, whereby the Copenhagen standard language gradually displaced the regional vernacular languages. After the Schleswig referendum in 1920 a number of Danes remained as a minority within German territories.^[23] Throughout the 19th Century Danes emigrated, establishing small expatriate communities in the Americas, particularly in the US, Canada, and Argentina where memory and some use of Danish remains today.

After the occupation of Denmark by Germany in World War II, the 1948 orthography reform dropped the German influenced rule of capitalizing nouns, and introduced the letter Å/å. Three 20th century Danish authors have become Nobel Prize laureates in Literature: Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan (joint recipients in 1917) and Johannes V. Jensen (awarded 1944).

With the exclusive use of rigsdansk, the High Copenhagenian Standard, in national broadcasting, the traditional dialects came under increased pressure. In the 20th century they have all but disappeared, and the standard language has extended throughout the country.^[24] Minor regional pronunciation variation of the standard language, sometimes called regionssprog ("regional languages") remain, and are in some cases vital. Today the major varieties of Standard Danish are High Copenhagenian, associated with elderly, well to-do and well educated people of the capital, and low-Copenhagenian traditionally associated with the working class, but today adopted as the prestige variety of the younger generations.^[25][26] Also in the 21st century the influence of immigration has had linguistic consequences, such as the emergence of a so-called multiethnolect in the urban areas, an immigrant Danish variety (also known as Perkerdansk), combining elements of different immigrant languages such as Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish, as well as English and Danish.^[25]

Geographic distribution

Danish is the national language of Denmark and one of two official languages of the Faroe Islands (alongside Faroese). Until 2009, it had also been one of two official languages of Greenland (alongside Greenlandic). Danish is widely spoken in Greenland now as lingua franca, and an unknown portion of the native Greenlandic population has Danish as their first language; a large percentage of the native Greenlandic population speak Danish as a second language since its introduction into the education system as a compulsory language in 1928. Danish was an official language in Iceland until 1944, but is today still widely used and is a mandatory subject in school taught as a second foreign language after English.^[27]

In addition, there is a noticeable community of Danish speakers in Southern Schleswig, the portion of Germany bordering Denmark, where it is an officially recognized regional language, just as German 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.^[28] Under the Nordic Language Convention, Danish-speaking citizens of the Nordic countries have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable for any interpretation or translation costs.^[28]

The more widespread of the two varieties of Norwegian, Bokmål, is very close to Danish, because standard Danish was used as the de facto administrative language until 1814. Bokmål is based on Danish unlike the other variety of Norwegian, Nynorsk, which is based on the Norwegian dialects, with Old Norwegian as an important reference point.^[7]

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.^[29] Since 1997 public authorities have been obliged to observe the official spelling by way of the Orthography Law. In the 21st century there have been discussions regarding creating a language law that would make Danish the official language of Denmark.^[30]

Dialects

Standard Danish (rigsdansk) is the language based on dialects spoken in and around the capital, 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 of the capital, 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.^[24][7]

Danish dialects can be divided into the traditional dialects, which differ from modern Standard Danish in both phonology and grammar, and the Danish accents or regional languages, which are local varieties of the Standard language distinguished mostly by pronunciation and local vocabulary colored by traditional dialects. Traditional dialects are now mostly extinct in Denmark, with only the oldest generations still speaking them.^[31][24]

Danish traditional dialects are divided into three main dialect areas:

• Insular Danish (ømål), including dialects of the Danish islands of Zealand, Funen, Lolland, Falster, and Møn^[32]
• Jutlandic (jysk), further divided in North, East, West and South Jutlandic^[33]
• Bornholmian (bornholmsk) the dialect of the island of Bornholm^[34]

Jutlandic is further divided into Southern Jutlandic and Northern Jutlandic, with Northern Jutlandic subdivided into North Jutlandic and West Jutlandic. Insular Danish is divided into Zealand, Funen, Møn and Lolland-Falster dialect areas - each with addition internal variation. The term Eastern Danish^[35] is occasionally used for Bornholmian, but including the dialects of Scania (particularly in a historical context). Jutlandic dialect, Insular Danish and Bornholmian. Bornholmian is the only Eastern Danish dialect spoken in Denmark, since the other Eastern Danish dialects were spoken in areas ceded to Sweden and subsequently swedified.

Traditional dialects differ both in phonology, grammar and vocabulary from standard Danish. Phonologically, one of the most diagnostic differences is the presence or absence of stød.^[36] There are four main regional variants for the realization of stød: In Southeastern Jutlandic, Southernmost Funen, Southern Langeland and Ærø, there is no stød but instead a pitch accent. South of a line (Danish: Stødgrænsen "The Stød border") going through central South Jutland, crossing Southern Funen and central Langeland and north of Lolland-Falster, Møn, Southern Zealand and Bornholm there is neither stød nor pitch accent.^[37] In most of Jutland and on Zealand there is stød, and in Zealandic traditional dialects and regional language there are often more stød occurrences than in the standard language. In Zealand the stød line divides Southern Zealand (without stød), an area which used to be directly under the Crown, from the rest of the Island that used to be the property of various noble estates.^[38][39]

Grammatically, a dialectally significant feature is the number of grammatical genders. Standard Danish has two genders and the definite form of nouns is formed by the use of suffixes, while Western Jutlandic has only one gender and the definite form of nouns uses an article before the noun itself, in the same fashion as West Germanic languages. The Bornholmian dialect has maintained to this day many archaic features, such as a distinction between three grammatical genders.^[34] Insular Danish traditional dialects also conserved three grammatical genders. By 1900 Zealand insular dialects had been reduced to two genders under influence from the standard language, but other Insular varieties, such as Funen dialect had not.^[40] Besides using three genders, the old Insular or Funen dialect, could also use personal pronouns (like he and she) in certain cases, particularly referring to animals. A classic example in traditional Funen dialect is the sentence: "Katti, han får unger", literally The cat, he is having kittens, because cat is a male noun, and thus are referred to as han (he), even if it is female cat.^[41]

Phonology

The sound system of Danish is unusual among the world's languages, particularly in its large vowel inventory and in the unusual prosody. In informal or rapid speech the language is prone to considerable reduction of unstressed syllables, creating many vowel-less syllables with syllabic consonants, as well as reduction of final consonants. Furthermore, the language's prosody does not include many clues about the sentence structure, unlike many other languages, making it relatively more difficult to segment the speech flow into its constituent elements.^[5][42] These factors taken together make Danish pronunciation difficult to master for learners, and there are even indications that Danish children take slightly longer in learning to segment speech in early childhood.^[6]

Vowels

Although somewhat depending on analysis, most modern variants of Danish distinguish 12 long vowels, 13 short vowels and two schwa vowels, /ə/ and /ɐ/ that only occur in unstressed syllables. This gives a total of 27 different vowel phonemes - a very large number among the world's languages.^[43] At least 19 different diphthongs also occur, all with a short first vowel and the second segment being either [i̯], [u̯] or [ɐ̯].^[44] The table below shows the approximate distribution of the vowels as given by Grønnum (1998) in Modern Standard Danish, with the symbols used in IPA for Danish. Questions of analysis may give a slightly different inventory, for example based on whether r-colored vowels are considered distinct phonemes. Basbøll (2005):50 gives 25 "full vowels", not counting the two unstressed schwa-vowels.

	Front		Central	Back
	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded
Close	i, iː	y, yː		u, uː
Near-close	e, eː
Close-mid	ɛ, ɛː	ø, øː		o, oː
Mid		œ, œː	ə	ɔ, ɔː
Open-mid	æ, æː	œ̞, œ̞ː		ɒ, ɒː
Near-open	a	ɶ, ɶː	ʌ, ɐ
Open			ɑ, ɑː

Consonants

The consonant inventory is comparatively simple. Basbøll (2005:73) distinguishes 16 non-syllabic consonant phonemes in Danish.

	Labial		Alveolar		Alveolo -palatal	Velar		Uvular/ pharyngeal[45]	Glottal
Nasal	/m/		/n/			/ŋ/
Plosive	/p/	/b/	/t/	/d/		/k/	/ɡ/
Fricative	/f/		/s/						/h/
Approximant	/v/		/l/		/j/			/ʁ/

Many of these phonemes have quite different allophones in onset and coda. Phonetically there is no voicing distinction among the stops, rather the distinction is one of aspiration and fortis vs. lenis.^[44] /p t k/ are aspirated in onset realized as [b̥ʰ, d̥ˢ, ɡ̊ʰ], but not in coda. The pronunciation of t, [d̥ˢ], is in between a simple aspirated [d̥ʰ] and a fully affricated [d̥s] as has happened in German with many words that now contain z. The stops /b d g/ are realized as [b̥, d̥, ɡ̊] in onset and as [b̥ ð̞ˠ̠, j/ʊ̯] in coda. In syllable onset the phonemes /b d ɡ v j r/ are contoid (having enough closure to produce friction), but in coda syllables they become vocoids, with no audible friction making them phonetically similar to vowels. For example, /v b/ is pronounced as a [w]-sound in syllable coda e.g. /grav, løb/ ("grave, ran") are pronounced [grau̯, løu̯].

[ʋ, ð] often have slight frication, but are usually pronounced as approximants. Danish [ð] differs from the similar sound in English and Icelandic, in that it is not a dental fricative but an alveolar approximant which sounds like and is frequently mistaken for an [l] (or [ɮ]) by second language learners.^[44]

The sound [ɕ] is found for example in the word /sjovˀ/ "fun" pronounced [ɕɔu̯ˀ] and /tjalˀ/ "marijuana" pronounced [tɕalˀ]. Some analyses have posited it as a phoneme, but since it occurs only after /s/ or /t/ and [j] doesn't occur after these phonemes, it can be analyzed as an allophone of /j/, which is devoiced after voiceless alveolar frication. This makes it unnecessary to postulate a /ɕ/-phoneme in Danish.^[46]

In onset /r/ is realized as a uvu-pharyngeal approximant, [ʁ], but in coda it is either realized as a non-syllabic low central vowel, [ɐ̯] or simply coalesces with the preceding vowel. The phenomenon is comparable to the r in German or in non-rhotic pronunciations of English. The Danish pronunciation of /r/ as a so-called skarre-r distinguishes the language from those varieties of Norwegian and Swedish that use trilled [r].

Prosody

Danish is characterized by a prosodic feature called stød (lit. "thrust"). This is a form of laryngealization or creaky voice. Some sources have described it as a glottal stop, but this is a very infrequent realization, and today phoneticians consider it a phonation type or a prosodic phenomenon.^[47] It has phonemic status, since it serves as the sole distinguishing feature of words with different meanings in minimal pairs such as bønder ("peasants") with stød, versus bønner ("beans") without stød. The distribution of stød in the vocabulary is related to the distribution of the common Scandinavian pitch accents found in most dialects of Norwegian and Swedish.^[48]

Stress is phonemic and distinguishes words such as billigst [ˈbilist] "cheapest" and bilist [biˈlist] "car driver".^[49]

Grammar

Similarly to the case of English, modern Danish grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-European dependent marking pattern with a rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order, to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection, a fairly fixed SVO word order and a complex syntax. Some traits typical of Germanic languages persist in Danish, such as the distinction between irregularly inflected strong stems inflected through ablaut (i.e. changing the vowel of the stem, as in the pairs tager/tog ("takes/took") and fod/fødder ("foot/feet")) and weak stems inflected through affixation (such as elsker/elskede "love/loved", bil/biler "car/cars"). Vestiges of the Germanic case and gender system are found in the pronoun system. Typically for an Indo-European language, Danish follows accusative morphosyntactic alignment. Danish distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, numerals, adjectives, adverbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections and ideophones.^[50]

Nouns

Nouns are inflected for number (singular vs. plural) and definiteness, and are classified into two grammatical genders. Only pronouns inflect for case, and the previous genitive case has become an enclitic. A distinctive feature of the Scandinavian languages, including Danish, is that the definite articles, which also mark noun gender, has developed into suffixes. Typically of Germanic languages plurals are either irregular or "strong" stems inflected through ablaut (i.e. changing the vowel of the stem (e.g. fod/fødder "foot/feet", mand/mænd "man/men") or "weak" stems inflected through affixation (e.g. skib/skibe "ship/ships", kvinde/kvinder "woman/women").^[51]

Gender

Standard Danish has two nominal genders: common and neuter; the common gender arose as the historical feminine and masculine genders conflated into a single category. Some traditional dialects retain a three-way gender distinction, between masculine, feminine and neuter, and some dialects of Jutland have a masculine/feminine contrast. 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.The gender of a noun determines the form of adjectives that modify it, and the form of the definite suffixes. ^[52]

Definiteness

Danish regular plural patterns

Class 1			Class 2			Class 3
Sg.	Pl.	Pl. definite.	Sg.	Pl.	Pl. definite.	Sg.	Pl.	Pl. definite.
måned month	måneder months	månederne the months	dag day	dage days	dagene "the days"	år year	år years	årene the years
bil car	biler cars	bilerne the cars	hund dog	hunde dogs	hundene the dogs	fisk fish	fisk fishes	fiskene the fishes

Definiteness is marked by two mutually exclusive articles, a preposed demonstrative article which occurs with nouns that are modified by an adjective or a postposed enclitic.^[53] Neuter nouns take the clitic -et, and common gender nouns take -en. Indefinite nouns take the articles en (common gender) or et (neuter). Hence, the common gender noun en mand "a man" (indefinite) has the definite form manden "the man", whereas the neuter noun et hus "a house" (indefinite) has the definite form, "the house" (definite) huset.^{[52] [54]}

Indefinite:

Jeg så et hus

"I saw a house"

Definite with enclitic article:

Jeg så huset

"I saw the house"

Definite with preposed demonstrative article:

Jeg så det store hus^[55]

"I saw the big house"

The plural definite ending is -(e)ne (e.g. drenge "boys > drengene "the boys" and piger "girls" > pigerne "the girls"), and nouns ending in -ere lose the last -e before adding the -ne suffix (e.g. danskere "Danes" > danskerne "the Danes"). When the noun is modified by an adjective, the definiteness is marked by the definite article den (common) or det (neuter) and the definite/plural form of the adjective: den store mand "the big man", det store hus "the big house".^[56][54]

Number

Danish irregular plurals

Sg.	Pl.	Pl. definite
mand man	mænd men	mændene the men
ko cow	køer cows	køerne the cows
øje eye	øjne eyes	øjnene the eyes
konto account	konti accounts	kontiene the accounts

There are three different types of regular plurals: Class 1 forms the plural with the suffix -er (sg.) and -erne (pl.), Class 2 with the suffix -e (sg.) and -ene (pl.), and Class 3 takes no suffix for the singular form and -ene for the plural.^[57]

Most irregular nouns take an ablaut plural (with a change in the stem vowel), or combine ablaut stem-change with the suffix, and some have unique plural forms. Unique forms may be inherited (e.g. the plural of øje "eye", which is the old dual form øjne), or for loan words they may be borrowed from the donor language (e.g. the word konto "account" which is borrowed from Italian and uses the Italian masculine plural form konti "accounts").^[58][59]

Possession

Possessive phrases are formed with the enclitic -s, for example min fars hus "my father's house" where the noun far carries the possessive enclitic.^[60] This is however not a case of genitive case marking, because in the case of longer noun phrases the -s attaches to the last word in the phrase, which need not be the head-noun or even a noun at all. For example, the phrases kongen af Danmark's bolsjefabrik "the king of Denmark's candy factory", or det er pigen Uffe bor sammen meds datter "that is the daughter of the girl that Uffe lives with", where the enclitic attaches to a stranded preposition.^[61][62]

Pronouns

Danish personal pronouns

Person	Subjective case	Objective case	Dependent possessive	Independent possessive
1st p. sg.	jeg I	mig me	min/mit my	mine mine
2nd o. sg.	du You	dig you	din/dit your	dine yours
3rd p. sg.	han/hun /den/det he/she/it	ham/hende /den/det him/her/it	hans/hendes /dens/dets his/her/its	hans/hendes /dens/dets his/her/its
1st p. pl.	vi we	os us	vores our	vores ours
2nd p. pl.	I you (pl.)	jer you (pl.)	jeres your (pl.)	jeres your (pl.)
3rd p. pl	de they	dem them	deres their	deres their

As does English, the Danish pronominal system retains a distinction between subjective and oblique case. The subjective case form of pronouns is used when pronouns occur as grammatical subject of a sentence, and oblique forms are used for all non-subjective occurrences including accusative, dative, predicative, comparative and other types of constructions. The third person singular pronouns also distinguish between and animate masculine (han "he"), animate feminine (hun "she") forms, as well as inanimate neuter (det "it") and inanimate common gender (den "it") ^[63]

Jeg sover

"I sleep"

Du sover

"you sleep"

Jeg kysser dig

"I kiss you"

du kysser mig

"you kiss me"

Possessive pronouns have independent and adjectival forms. The adjectival form is used immediately preceding the possessed noun (det er min hest "it is my horse"), whereas the independent possessive pronoun is used in place of the possessed noun (den er min "it is mine"). In the third person singular sin is used when the owner is also the subject of the sentence, whereas hans ("his"), hendes (her) and dens/dets "its" is used when the owner is different from the grammatical subject.^[64][65]

Han tog sin hat

He took his (own) hat

Han tog hans hat

He took his hat (someone else's hat)

Nominal compounds

Like all Germanic languages, Danish forms compound nouns. These are represented in Danish orthography as one word, as in kvindehåndboldlandsholdet, "the female national handball team". In some cases, nouns are joined with an extra s, originally possessive in function, 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").

Verbs

-

infinitive	Present	Past
at være to be	er is/are/am	var was/were
at se to see	ser sees	så saw
at vide to know	ved knows	vidste knew
at huske to remember	husker remembers	huskede remembered
at glemme to forget	glemmer forgets	glemte forgot

Danish verbs are morphologically simple, marking very few grammatical categories. They do not mark person or number of subject, although the marking of plural subjects was still used in writing as late as the 19th century. Verbs have a past, non-past and infinitive form, past and present participle forms, and a passive, and an imperative.^[66]

Tense, Aspect, Mood, Voice

Verbs can be divided into two main classes, the strong/irregular verbs and the regular/weak verbs.^[53] The regular verbs are also divided into two classes, those that take the past suffix -te and those that take the suffix -ede.^[67]

The infinitive always ends in a vowel, usually -e (pronounced [ə]), infinitive forms are preceded by the article at (pronounced [ɒ]).^[67] The non-past or present tense takes the suffix -r, except for a few strong verbs that have irregular non-past forms. The past form does not necessarily mark past tense, but also counterfactuality or conditionality, and the non-past has many uses besides present tense time reference.^[68]

The present participle ends in -ende (e.g. løbende "running"), and the past participle ends in -et (e.g. løbet "run"), -t (e.g. købt "bought"). Additional composite tenses are constructed with auxiliary verbs (e.g. at være "to be" and at have "to have") and participial forms:

Hun er gået

"She has left"

Hun har gået

"She has walked"

Hun var gået

"She had left"

Hun blev siddende

She remained seated (lit. "she stayed sitting")

The passive form takes the suffix -s: avisen læses hver dag ("the newspaper is read every day"). Another passive construction uses the auxiliary verb at blive "to become": avisen bliver læst hver dag.^[68][69]

The imperative mood is formed from the infinitive by removing the final schwa-vowel:

løb!

"run!"

Syntax

Danish basic constituent order in simple sentences with both a subject and an object is Subject-Verb-Object.^[70] However, Danish is also a V2 language, which means that the verb must always be the second constituent of the sentence. Following the Danish grammarian Paul Diderichsen^[71] Danish grammar tends to be analyzed as consisting of slots or fields, and in which certain types of sentence material can be moved to the pre-verbal (or "grounding") field to achieve different pragmatic effects. Usually the sentence material occupying the preverbal slot has to be pragmatically marked, usually either new information or topics. There is no rule that subjects must occur in the preverbal slot, but since subject and topic often coincide, they often do. Therefore, whenever any sentence material that is not the subject occurs in the preverbal position the subject is demoted to postverbal position and the sentence order becomes VSO.^[72]

Peter (S) så (V) Jytte (O)

"Peter saw Jytte"

but

I går så (V) Peter (S) Jytte (O)

"Yesterday, Peter saw Jytte"

When there is no pragmatically marked constituents in the sentence to take the preverbal slot (for example when all the information is new), the slot has to take a dumm subject "der".^[73]

der kom en pige ind ad døren

there came a girl in through the door

"A girl came in the door"

Main clauses

Haberland (1994, p. 336) describes the basic order of sentence constituents in main clauses as comprising the following 8 positions:

Og	ham	havde	Per	ikke	skænket	en tanke	i årevis
And	him	had	Per	not	given	a thought	for years
0	1	2	3	4	5	7
"And him Per hadn't given a thought in years"

Position 0 is not part of the sentence and can only contain sentential connectors (such as conjunctions or interjections). Position 1 can contain any sentence constituent. Position 2 can only contain the main verb. Position 3 is the subject position, unless the subject is fronted to occur in position 1. Position 4 can only contain light adverbs and the negation. Position 5 is for non-finite verbs, such as auxiliaries. Position 6 is the position of direct and indirect objects, and position 7 is for heavy adverbial constituents.^[72]

Questions with wh-words are formed differently from yes/no questions. In wh-questions the question word occupies the preverbal field, regardless of whether its grammatical role is subject or object or adverbial. In yes/no questions the preverbal field is empty, so that the sentence begins with the verb.

Wh-question:

hvem så du?'

who saw you

"who did you see?"

så du ham?

saw you him?

"did you see him?"

Subordinate clauses

In subordinate clauses, the syntax differs from that of main clauses. In the subordinate clause structure the verb is preceded by the subject and any light adverbial material (e.g. negation).^[74] Complement clauses begin with the particle at in the "connector field".

Han sagde at han ikke ville gå

he said that he not would go

"He said that he did not want to go"

Relative clauses are marked by the relative articles som or der which occupy the preverbal slot:

Jeg kender en mand som bor i Helsingør^[75]

"I know a man who lives in Elsinore"

Vocabulary

About 2000 of Danish non-compound words are derived from the Old Norse language, and ultimately from Proto Indo-European. Of these 2000 words, 1200 are nouns, 500 are verbs, 180 are adjectives and the rest belong to other word classes.^[76] Danish has also absorbed a considerable number of loan words, most of which were borrowed from Middle Low German in the late medieval period. Out of the 500 most frequently used Words in Danish, 100 are Medieval loans from Middle Low German.^[77] In the 17th and 18th Centuries standard German and French superseded Low German influence and in the 20th Century English became the main supplier of loan words, especially after World War II. Although many old Nordic words remain, some were replaced with borrowed synonyms, as can be seen with æde (to eat) which became less common when the Low German spise came into fashion. As well as loan words, new words are freely formed by compounding existing words. In standard text in contemporary Danish Middle Low German loans account for about 16-17% of the vocabulary, Graeco-Latin-loans 4-8 %, French 2-4 % and English about 1%.^[77]

Danish and English are both Germanic languages, Danish a North Germanic language descended from Old Norse and English a West Germanic language descended from Old English, and Old Norse exerted a strong influence on Old English in the early medieval period. To see their shared Germanic heritage, one merely has to note the many common words that are very similar in the two languages. For example, Danish words for commonly used nouns and prepositions are easily recognizable in their written form to English speakers, such as have, over, under, for, give, flag, salt, and kat.^[78] Similarly, some other words are almost identical to their Scottish equivalents, e.g., kirke (Scottish kirk, i.e., 'church') or barn (Scottish bairn, i.e. 'child'). In addition, the word by, meaning "village" or "town", occurs in many English place-names, such as Whitby and Selby, as remnants of the Viking occupation. During the latter period, English adopted "are", the third person plural form of the verb "to be", as well as the corresponding personal pronoun form "they" from contemporary Old Norse.

Numerals

In the word forms of numbers above 20, the units are stated before the tens, so 21 is rendered enogtyve, literally "one and twenty".

The numeral halvanden means 1½ (literally "half second", implying "one plus half of the second one"). The numerals halvtredje (2½), halvfjerde (3½) and halvfemte (4½) are obsolete, but still implicitly used in the vigesimal system described below. Similarly, the temporal designation klokken halv tre, literally "half three o'clock", is half past two.

One peculiar feature of the Danish language is the fact that numerals 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 are (somewhat like the French numerals from 80 through 99) based on a vigesimal system, meaning that the score (20) is used as a base unit in counting. Tres (short for tre-sinds-tyve, "three times twenty") means 60, while 50 is halvtreds (short for halvtredje-sinds-tyve, "half third times twenty", implying two score plus half of the third score). The ending sindstyve meaning "times twenty" is no longer included in cardinal numbers, but still used in ordinal numbers. Thus, in modern Danish fifty-two is usually rendered as tooghalvtreds from the now obsolete tooghalvtredsindstyve, whereas 52nd is either tooghalvtredsende or tooghalvtredsindstyvende. Twenty is tyve (derived from old Danish tiughu, a haplology of tuttiughu, meaning 'two tens'^[79]), while thirty is tredive (Old Danish þrjatiughu, "three tens"), and forty is fyrre (Old Danish fyritiughu, "four tens"^[80] via fyrretyve.^[81] Thus, the suffix -tyve should be understood as a plural of ti (10), though to modern Danes tyve means 20, making it hard to explain why fyrretyve is 40 (four tens) and not 80 (four times twenty).

Cardinal numeral	Danish	Literal translation	Ordinal numeral	Danish	Literal translation
1	én / ét	one	1st	første	first
12	tolv	twelve	12th	tolvte	twelfth
23	treogtyve	three and twenty	23rd	treogtyvende	three and 20th
34	fireogtredive	four and thirty	34th	fireogtred(i)vte	four and 30th
45	femogfyrre(tyve)	five and forty (four tens)	45th	femogfyrretyvende	five and four tens-th
56	seksoghalvtreds(indstyve)	six and [two score plus] half [of the] third (score)	56th	seksoghalvtredsindstyvende	six and [two score plus] half [of the] third score-th
67	syvogtres(indstyve)	seven and three (score)	67th	syvogtresindstyvende	seven and three score-th
78	otteoghalvfjerds(indstyve)	eight and [three score plus] half [of the] fourth (score)	78th	otteoghalvfjerdsindstyvende	eight and [three score plus] half [of the] fourth score-th
89	niogfirs(indstyve)	nine and four (score)	89th	niogfirsindstyvende	nine and four score-th
90	halvfems(indstyve)	[four score plus] half [of the] fifth (score)	90th	halvfemsindstyvende	[four score plus] half [of the] fifth score-th

For large numbers (one billion or larger), Danish uses the long scale, so that the short scale billion (1,000,000,000) is called milliard, and the short scale trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is billion.

Writing system

The oldest preserved examples of written Danish (from the Iron and Viking Ages) are in the Runic alphabet.^[82] The introduction of Christianity also brought the Latin script to Denmark, and at the end of the High Middle Ages Runes had more or less been replaced by Latin letters.

Danish orthography is highly conservative, still using most of the conventions established in the 16th century. The spoken language however has changed a lot since then, creating a severe gap between the spoken and written languages.^[83]

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 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 digraph aa.^[82] The old usage still occurs in some personal and geographical names (for example, the name of the city of Aalborg is spelled with Aa following a decision by the City Council in the 1970s and Aarhus decided to go back to Aa in 2011). 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 due to technical limitations (e.g., in URLs), they are often replaced by ae (Æ, æ), oe or o (Ø, ø), and aa (Å, å), 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). Modern Danish and Norwegian use the same alphabet, though spelling differs slightly.

Notes and references

Bibliography

External links

Danish edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For a list of words relating to Danish language, see the Danish language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikibooks has more on the topic of: Danish language

Wikivoyage has a phrasebook for Danish.

• "Sproget.dk" sproget.dk is the place on the internet where you can find guidance, information and answers to questions about the Danish language and language matters in Denmark (in Danish)

See also

Realm languages:

• Faroese
• Greenlandic

Nordic languages:

• Icelandic
• Norweigian
• Swedish