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Danish language

Danish (/ˈdnɪʃ/ (listen); dansk pronounced [ˈtænˀsk] (listen), dansk sprog [ˈtænˀsk ˈspʁɔwˀ])[1] is a North Germanic language spoken by about six million people, principally in and around Denmark. Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland,[5] the Faroe Islands, and the northern German region of Southern Schleswig, where it has minority language status.[6][7] Minor Danish-speaking communities are also found in Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina.[8]

Danish
dansk
The first page of the Jutlandic Law originally from 1241 in Codex Holmiensis, copied in 1350.
The first sentence is: "Mæth logh skal land byggas"
Modern orthography: "Med lov skal land bygges"
English translation: "With law shall a country be built"
Pronunciation[ˈtænˀsk][1]
Native to
RegionDenmark, Schleswig-Holstein (Germany);
Additionally in the Faroe Islands and Greenland
Ethnicity
Native speakers
6.0 million (2019)[2]
Early forms
Dialects
Official status
Official language in
 Kingdom of Denmark
Recognised minority
language in
Regulated by
Dansk Sprognævn
(Danish Language Council)
Language codes
ISO 639-1da
ISO 639-2dan
ISO 639-3Either:
dan – Insular Danish
jut – Jutlandic
Glottologdani1285  Danish
juti1236  Jutish
Linguasphere5 2-AAA-bf & -ca to -cj
     Regions where Danish is the national language (Denmark)

     Regions where Danish is an official language but not a majority native language (Faroe Islands)

     Regions where Danish is a recognized minority language (Greenland, Germany)
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Along with the other North Germanic languages, Danish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples who 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 (or continental) Scandinavian", while Icelandic and Faroese are classified as "insular Scandinavian". Although the written languages are compatible, spoken Danish is distinctly different from Norwegian and Swedish and thus the degree of mutual intelligibility with either is variable between regions and speakers.

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 the printing press, 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 almost disappeared, though regional variants of the standard language exist. The main differences in language are between generations, with youth language being particularly innovative.

Danish has a very large vowel inventory consisting of 27 phonemically distinctive vowels,[9] and its prosody is characterized by the distinctive phenomenon stød, a kind of laryngeal phonation type. Due to the many pronunciation differences that set Danish apart from its neighboring languages, particularly the vowels, difficult prosody and "weakly" pronounced consonants, it is sometimes considered to be a "difficult language to learn, acquire and understand",[10][11] and some evidence shows that children are slower to acquire the phonological distinctions of Danish compared to other languages.[12] The grammar is moderately inflective with strong (irregular) and weak (regular) conjugations and inflections. Nouns and demonstrative pronouns distinguish common and neutral gender. Like English, Danish only has remnants of a former case system, particularly in the pronouns. Unlike English, it has lost all person marking on verbs. Its word order is V2, with the finite verb always occupying the second slot in the sentence.

Classification

Danish and its historical relationships to other North Germanic languages within the Germanic branch of Indo-European. Another classification can be drawn based on mutual intelligibility.

Danish is a Germanic language of the North Germanic branch. Other names for this group are the Nordic[13] 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.[14][15]

Scandinavian languages are often considered a dialect continuum, where no sharp dividing lines are seen between the different vernacular languages.[14]

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.[14]

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.[14] Contemporary Scanian is fully mutually intelligible with Swedish and less so with Danish since it shares a standardized vocabulary and less distinct pronunciations with the rest of Sweden than in the past. Blekinge and Halland, the two other provinces further away from Copenhagen that transitioned to Sweden in the 17th century, speak dialects more similar to standard Swedish.

Vocabulary

 
Danish label reading militærpoliti, "military police", on a police vehicle

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.[16] Danish has also absorbed a large 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, as Low German was the other official language of Denmark–Norway.[17] 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 texts of 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%.[17]

Danish and English are both Germanic languages. Danish is a North Germanic language descended from Old Norse, and English is a West Germanic language descended from Old English. 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, commonly used Danish nouns and prepositions such as have, over, under, for, give, flag, salt, and kat are easily recognizable in their written form to English speakers.[18] Similarly, some other words are almost identical to their Scots equivalents, e.g., kirke (Scots kirk, i.e., 'church') or barn (Scots 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.

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 the mutual intelligibility is asymmetric: 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.[19] 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.[20] Among younger Danes, Copenhageners are worse at understanding Swedish than Danes from the provinces. In general, younger Danes are not as good at understanding the neighboring languages as are Norwegian and Swedish youths.[19]

History

The Danish philologist Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen divided the history of Danish into a period from 800 AD to 1525 to be "Old Danish", which he subdivided into "Runic Danish" (800-1100), Early Middle Danish (1100–1350) and Late Middle Danish (1350–1525).[21]

Runic Danish

 
The approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century:
  Other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility

Móðir Dyggva var Drótt, dóttir Danps konungs, sonar Rígs er fyrstr var konungr kallaðr á danska tungu.
"Dyggvi's mother was Drott, the daughter of king Danp, Ríg's son, who was the first to be called king in the Danish tongue."

Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson[22]

By the eighth 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.[23]

From the seventh 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.[24] 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. Also, a change of au as in dauðr into ø as in døðr occurred. 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.[25]

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, and 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 "knife" (kniv), "husband" (husbond), and "egg" (æg). 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.[26]

Old and Middle dialects

Fangær man saar i hor seng mæth annæns mansz kunæ. oc kumær han burt liuænd....
"If one catches someone in the whore-bed with another man's wife and he comes away alive..."

Jutlandic Law, 1241[27]

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.[28]

Throughout this period, Danish was in contact with Low German, and many Low German loan words were introduced in this period.[29] 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. Also in this period, Danish began 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/.[30]

The first printed book in Danish dates from 1495, the Rimkrøniken (Rhyming Chronicle), a history book told in rhymed verses.[31] 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.[32]

Early Modern

Herrer og Narre have frit Sprog.
"Lords and jesters have free speech."

Peder Syv, proverbs

Following the first Bible translation, the development of Danish as a written language, as a language of religion, administration, and public discourse accelerated. In the second half of the 17th century, 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. Major authors from this period are Thomas Kingo, poet and psalmist, and Leonora Christina Ulfeldt, whose novel Jammersminde (Remembered Woes) is considered a literary masterpiece by scholars. 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").[33]

The East Danish provinces were lost to Sweden after the Second Treaty of Brömsebro (1645) after which they were gradually Swedified; just as Norway was politically severed from Denmark, beginning 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 Danish 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, likely 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.[34]

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 continued to develop 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 until the mid-20th century.[33]

Standardized national language

Moders navn er vort Hjertesprog,
kun løs er al fremmed Tale.
Det alene i mund og bog,
kan vække et folk af dvale.

"Mother's name is our hearts' tongue,
only idle is all foreign speech
It alone, in mouth or in book,
can rouse a people from sleep."

N.F.S. Grundtvig, "Modersmaalet"

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.[35] 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. 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.

 
Language shift in the 19th century in southern Schleswig

After the Schleswig referendum in 1920, a number of Danes remained as a minority within German territories.[36] 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⟩. 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 Copenhagen 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.[37] 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 Copenhagen Standard, associated with elderly, well to-do, and well educated people of the capital, and low Copenhagen speech traditionally associated with the working class, but today adopted as the prestige variety of the younger generations.[38][39] 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.[38]

Geographic distribution and status

Danish Realm

Within the Danish Realm, 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 speaks 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. Iceland was a territory ruled by Denmark–Norway, one of whose official languages was Danish.[40] About 10% of the population of Greenland speak Danish as their first language owing to immigration.[5]

No law stipulates an official language for Denmark, making Danish the de facto official language only. The Code of Civil Procedure does, however, lay down Danish as the language of the courts.[41] Since 1997, public authorities have been obliged to observe the official spelling by way of the Orthography Law. In the 21st century, discussions have been held regarding creating a language law that would make Danish the official language of Denmark.[42]

Surrounding countries

 
Learn Danish banner in Flensburg, Germany, where it is an officially recognized regional language

In addition, a noticeable community of Danish speakers is in Southern Schleswig, the portion of Germany bordering Denmark, and a Danish dialect is spoken in the area. Since 2015, Schleswig-Holstein has officially recognized Danish as a regional language,[6][7] 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.[43] 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.[43]

The more widespread of the two varieties of written Norwegian, Bokmål, is very close to Danish, because standard Danish was used as the de facto administrative language until 1814 and one of the official languages of Denmark–Norway. 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.[14]

Other locations

There are also Danish emigrant communities in other places of the world who still use the language in some form. In the Americas, Danish-speaking communities can be found in the US, Canada, Argentina and Brazil.[8]

Dialects

 
Map of Danish dialects
 
A map showing the distribution of stød in Danish dialects: Dialects in the pink areas have stød, as in standard Danish, while those in the green ones have tones, as in Swedish and Norwegian. Dialects in the blue areas have (like Icelandic, German, and English) neither stød nor tones.
 
The distribution of one, two, and three grammatical genders in Danish dialects. In Zealand, the transition from three to two genders has happened fairly recently. West of the red line, the definite article goes before the word as in English or German; east of the line it takes the form of a suffix.

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, which has resulted in a very homogeneous national speech norm.[37][14]

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.[44][37]

Danish traditional dialects are divided into three main dialect areas:

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"[48] 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 in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary from standard Danish. Phonologically, one of the most diagnostic differences is the presence or absence of stød.[49] Four main regional variants for the realization of stød are known: In Southeastern Jutlandic, Southernmost Funen, Southern Langeland, and Ærø, no stød is used, 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 neither stød nor pitch accent exists.[50] Most of Jutland and on Zealand use stød, and in Zealandic traditional dialects and regional language, stød occurs more often 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.[51][52]

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.[47] 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.[53] 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 masculine noun, thus is referred to as han (he), even if it is female cat.[54]

Phonology

Spoken Standard Danish of a male born 1978 in Esbjerg.

The sound system of Danish is unusual, 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 perceive the different sounds of the speech flow.[10][11] These factors taken together make Danish pronunciation difficult to master for learners, and Danish children are indicated to take slightly longer in learning to segment speech in early childhood.[12]

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.[55] At least 19 different diphthongs also occur, all with a short first vowel and the second segment being either [j], [w], or [ɐ̯].[56] The table below shows the approximate distribution of the vowels as given by Grønnum (1998a) in Modern Standard Danish, with the symbols used in IPA/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 unrounded rounded
Close i y u
Near-close e̝ː
Close-mid e øøː o
Mid ə
Open-mid ɛɛː œœː ʌ ɔɔː
Near-open æ œ̞œ̞ː ɐ
Open ɶ ɑɑː ɒɒː

Consonants

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

Many of these phonemes have quite different allophones in onset and coda where intervocalic consonants followed by a full vowel are treated as in onset, otherwise as in coda.[58] Phonetically there is no voicing distinction among the stops, rather the distinction is one of aspiration and fortis vs. lenis.[56] /p t k/ are aspirated in onset realized as [pʰ, tsʰ, kʰ], but not in coda. The pronunciation of t, [tsʰ], is in between a simple aspirated [tʰ] and a fully affricated [tsʰ] (as has happened in German with the second High German consonant shift from t to z). There is dialectal variation, and some Jutlandic dialects may be less affricated than other varieties, with Northern and Western Jutlandic traditional dialects having an almost unaspirated dry t.[59]

/v/ is pronounced as a [w] in syllable coda, so e.g. /ɡraːvə/ (grave) is pronounced [kʁɑːwə].[60]

[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 is frequently heard as [l] by second language learners.[56]

The sound [ɕ] is found for example in the word /sjovˀ/ "fun" pronounced [ɕɒwˀ] and /tjalˀ/ "marijuana" pronounced [tɕælˀ]. 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.[61] Jutlandic dialects often lack the sound [ɕ] and pronounce the sj cluster as [sj] or [sç].

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 realization of /r/ as guttural – the so-called skarre-r – distinguishes the language from those varieties of Norwegian and Swedish that use trilled [r]. Only very few, middle-aged or elderly, speakers of Jutlandic retain a frontal /r/ which is then usually realised as a flapped [ɾ] or approximant [ɹ].

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.[62] 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.[63]

Stress is phonemic and distinguishes words such as billigst [ˈpilist] "cheapest" and bilist [piˈlist] "car driver".[64]

Danish intonation has been described by Nina Grønnum as a hierarchical model where components such as the stress group, sentence type and prosodic phrase are combined, and where the stress group is the main intonation unit and in Copenhagen Standard Danish mainly has a certain pitch pattern that reaches its lowest peak on the stressed syllable followed by its highest peak on the following unstressed syllable, after which it declines gradually until the next stress group.[65] The stød is also dependent on stress, while some varieties also realize it primarily as a tone.[66] There are also various studies on specific interactional phenomena in Danish focusing on pitch, such as Mikkelsen & Kragelund on ways to mark the end of a story[67] and Steensig (2001) on turn-taking.[68]

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 or umlaut (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. Typical 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 onomatopoeia.[69]

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 Nordic languages, including Danish, is that the definite articles, which also mark noun gender, have developed into suffixes. Typical of Germanic languages plurals are either irregular or "strong" stems inflected through umlaut (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").[70]

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. [71]

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
fish (pl.)
fiskene
the fishes

Definiteness is marked by two mutually exclusive articles: either a postposed enclitic or a preposed article which is the obligatory way to mark definiteness when nouns are modified by an adjective.[72] 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.[71] [73]

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:[nb 1] "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".[74][73]

  1. ^ Note here that in Swedish and Norwegian the preposed and the enclitic article occur together (e.g. det store huset), whereas in Danish the enclitic article is replaced by the preposed demonstrative.

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 (indefinite) and -erne (definite), Class 2 with the suffix -e (indefinite) and -ene (definite), and Class 3 takes no suffix for the plural indefinite form and -ene for the plural definite.[75]

Most irregular nouns have an ablaut plural (i.e. 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").[76][77]

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.[78] This is however not an example 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 Danmarks bolsjefabrik "the king of Denmark's candy factory", where the factory is owned by the king of Denmark, 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.[79][80]

Pronouns

Danish personal pronouns
Person Nominative case Objective case Possessive case/adjective
1st p. sg. jeg
I
mig
me
min/mit/mine
my, mine
2nd p. sg. du
You
dig
you
din/dit/dine
your(s)
3rd p. sg. han/hun
/den/det

he/she/it
ham/hende
/den/det

him/her/it
hans/hendes
/dens/dets

his/her(s)/its
1st p. pl. vi
we
os
us
vores
our(s)
2nd p. pl. I
you (pl.)
jer
you (pl.)
jeres
your(s) (pl.)
3rd p. pl de
they
dem
them
deres
their(s)
3rd p. ref. N/A sig
him/her/itself, themself/selves
sin/sit/sine
his/her(s)/its (own)

As does English, the Danish pronominal system retains a distinction between nominative and oblique case. The nominative form of pronouns is used when pronouns occur as grammatical subject of a sentence (and only when non-coordinated and without a following modifier[81]), and oblique forms are used for all non-subject functions including direct and indirect object, predicative, comparative and other types of constructions. The third person singular pronouns also distinguish between animate masculine (han "he"), animate feminine (hun "she") forms, as well as inanimate neuter (det "it") and inanimate common gender (den "it"). [82]

  • 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 uses, but the same form.[83] The form is used both adjectivally preceding a possessed noun (det er min hest "it is my horse"), and independently in place of the possessed noun (den er min "it is mine"). In the third person singular, sin is used when the possessor is also the subject of the sentence, whereas hans ("his"), hendes (her) and dens/dets "its" is used when the possessor is different from the grammatical subject.[84][85]

  • 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 s as a linking element, 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 the linking element e instead, like gæstebog (from gæst and bog, meaning "guest book"). There are also irregular linking elements.

Verbs

-
infinitive Present Past
at være
to be
er
is/are/am
var
was/were
at se
to see
ser
sees

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.[86]

Tense, aspect, mood, and voice

Verbs can be divided into two main classes, the strong/irregular verbs and the regular/weak verbs.[72] The regular verbs are also divided into two classes, those that take the past suffix -te and those that take the suffix -ede.[87]

The infinitive always ends in a vowel, usually -e (pronounced [ə]), infinitive forms are preceded by the article at (pronounced [ɒ]) in some syntactic functions.[87] 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.[88]

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"). The Perfect is constructed with at have ("to have") and participial forms, like in English. But some transitive verbs form the perfect using at være ("to be") instead, and some may use both with a difference in meaning.

  • Hun har gået. Flyet har fløjet: She has walked. The plane has flown
  • Hun er gået. Flyet er fløjet: She has left. The plane has taken off
  • Hun havde gået. Flyet havde fløjet: She had walked. The plane had flown
  • Hun var gået. Flyet var fløjet: She had left. The plane had taken off

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.[88][89]

The imperative form is the infinitive without the final schwa-vowel, with stød potentially being applied depending on syllable structure.:

  • løb!: "run!"

Numerals

The numerals are formed on the basis of a vigesimal system with various rules. 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 1+12 (literally "half second", implying "one plus half of the second one"). The numerals halvtredje (2+12), halvfjerde (3+12) and halvfemte (4+12) 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 that the numerals 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 are (as are 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 may still be 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'[90]), while thirty is tredive (Old Danish þrjatiughu, "three tens"), and forty is fyrre (Old Danish fyritiughu, "four tens",[91] still used today as the archaism fyrretyve).[92] 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 twenties).

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.

Syntax

Danish basic constituent order in simple sentences with both a subject and an object is Subject–Verb–Object.[93] 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[94] 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 foundation) 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.[95]

  • 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 dummy subject "der".[96]

  • 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 6 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 finite 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.[95]

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 hun?: whom saw she, "whom did she see?"
  • så hun ham?: saw she him?, "did she see him?"

Subordinate clauses

In subordinate clauses, the word order 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).[97] 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 pronouns som or der which occupy the preverbal slot:

  • Jeg kender en mand, som bor i Helsingør:[98] "I know a man who lives in Elsinore"

Writing system and alphabet

 
Danish keyboard with keys for Æ, Ø, and Å

The oldest preserved examples of written Danish (from the Iron and Viking Ages) are in the Runic alphabet.[99] 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 conservative, using most of the conventions established in the 16th century. The spoken language however has changed a lot since then, creating a gap between the spoken and written languages.[100] Since 1955, Dansk Sprognævn has been the official language council in Denmark.

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. The letters ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨w⟩, ⟨x⟩ and ⟨z⟩ are only used in loan words. 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⟩.[99] The old usage continues to occur 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 same sound ⟨å⟩, ⟨aa⟩ is treated like ⟨å⟩ in alphabetical sorting, though it appears to be two letters. When the letters are not available due to technical limitations, they are often replaced by ⟨ae⟩ (for ⟨æ⟩), ⟨oe⟩ or ⟨o⟩ (for ⟨ø⟩), and ⟨aa⟩ (for ⟨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, particularly with the phonetic spelling of loanwords;[101] for example the spelling of station and garage in Danish remains identical to other languages, whereas in Norwegian, they are transliterated as stasjon and garasje.

Research

Danish is a well-studied language, and multiple universities in Denmark have departments devoted to Danish or linguistics with active research projects on the language, such as the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen,[102] and there are many dictionaries and technological resources on the language. The language council Dansk Sprognævn also publishes research on the language both nationally and internationally.[103] There are also research centers focusing specifically on the dialects: The Peter Skautrup center at Aarhus University describes the dialects and varieties of the Jutlandic peninsula and is working on a dictionary of Jutlandic,[104] while the Center for Dialect Research at University of Copenhagen works on the Insular Danish varieties.[105] The Puzzle of Danish - a research project at Aarhus University, funded by the Danish Research Council - investigates whether the challenging sound structure of Danish has an impact on how native speakers process and produce Danish language. Their findings suggest that native speaker of Danish tend to use contextual cues to process Danish sounds and sentences, more than native speakers of other comparable languages, and that they produce more lexically, syntactically, and semantically redundant language in conversation.[106]

Multiple corpora of Danish language data are available. The Danish Gigaword project provides a curated corpus of a billion words.[107] KorpusDK is a corpus of written texts in Danish.[108] There are also a number of conversations available in SamtaleBanken, the Danish part of TalkBank.[109][110]

Academic descriptions of the language are published both in Danish and English. The most complete grammar is the Grammatik over det Danske Sprog (Grammar over the Danish Language) by Erik Hansen & Lars Heltoft, and it is written in Danish and contains over 1800 pages.[111] Multiple phonologies have been written, most importantly by Basbøll[112] and Grønnum,[65] based on work that used to take place at the former Institute of Phonetics at the University of Copenhagen.

Example text

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Danish:

Alle mennesker er født frie og lige i værdighed og rettigheder. De er udstyret med fornuft og samvittighed, og de bør handle mod hverandre i en broderskabets ånd.[113]

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.[114]

See also

Realm languages:

Nordic languages:

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  93. ^ Becker-Christensen 2010, p. 24.
  94. ^ Diderichsen 1974.
  95. ^ a b Haberland 1994, p. 336.
  96. ^ Haberland 1994, p. 344.
  97. ^ Jensen 2011.
  98. ^ Haberland 1994, p. 345.
  99. ^ a b Rischel 2012, p. 815.
  100. ^ Rischel 2012, p. 820.
  101. ^ Waddingham & Ritter 2014, pp. 243–244.
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  105. ^ "Center for Dialektforskning". nors.ku.dk (in Danish). Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics. 23 June 2008. Retrieved 14 December 2021.
  106. ^ Trecca 2021.
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  109. ^ "SamtaleBank". samtalebank.talkbank.org. TalkBank.org. Retrieved 12 December 2021.
  110. ^ MacWhinney & Wagner 2010.
  111. ^ Hansen & Heltoft 2011.
  112. ^ Basbøll 2005.
  113. ^ "Universal Declaration of Human Rights". ohchr.org.
  114. ^ "Universal Declaration of Human Rights". United Nations.

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External links

  • "Sproget.dk" (a website where you can find guidance, information and answers to questions about the Danish language and language matters in Denmark (in Danish))
  • "Samtalegrammatik.dk" (parts of a grammar of spoken Danish)

danish, language, danish, listen, dansk, pronounced, ˈtænˀsk, listen, dansk, sprog, ˈtænˀsk, ˈspʁɔwˀ, north, germanic, language, spoken, about, million, people, principally, around, denmark, communities, danish, speakers, also, found, greenland, faroe, islands. Danish ˈ d eɪ n ɪ ʃ listen dansk pronounced ˈtaenˀsk listen dansk sprog ˈtaenˀsk ˈspʁɔwˀ 1 is a North Germanic language spoken by about six million people principally in and around Denmark Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland 5 the Faroe Islands and the northern German region of Southern Schleswig where it has minority language status 6 7 Minor Danish speaking communities are also found in Norway Sweden the United States Canada Brazil and Argentina 8 DanishdanskThe first page of the Jutlandic Law originally from 1241 in Codex Holmiensis copied in 1350 The first sentence is Maeth logh skal land byggas Modern orthography Med lov skal land bygges English translation With law shall a country be built Pronunciation ˈtaenˀsk 1 Native toDenmarkSchleswig Holstein Germany RegionDenmark Schleswig Holstein Germany Additionally in the Faroe Islands and GreenlandEthnicityDanesNative speakers6 0 million 2019 2 Language familyIndo European GermanicNorthwest Germanic 3 North GermanicEast Scandinavian 4 DanishEarly formsOld Norse Old East Norse Early Old Danish Late Old DanishDialectsBornholmian Eastern Danish Jutlandic South Jutlandic Insular DanishWriting systemLatin Danish alphabet Danish BrailleOfficial statusOfficial language in Kingdom of Denmark Denmark Faroe Islands Nordic Council European UnionRecognised minoritylanguage in Greenland GermanyRegulated byDansk Sprognaevn Danish Language Council Language codesISO 639 1 span class plainlinks da span ISO 639 2 span class plainlinks dan span ISO 639 3Either a href https iso639 3 sil org code dan class extiw title iso639 3 dan dan a Insular Danish a href https iso639 3 sil org code jut class extiw title iso639 3 jut jut a JutlandicGlottologdani1285 Danishjuti1236 JutishLinguasphere5 2 AAA bf amp ca to cj Regions where Danish is the national language Denmark Regions where Danish is an official language but not a majority native language Faroe Islands Regions where Danish is a recognized minority language Greenland Germany This article contains IPA phonetic symbols Without proper rendering support you may see question marks boxes or other symbols instead of Unicode characters For an introductory guide on IPA symbols see Help IPA Along with the other North Germanic languages Danish is a descendant of Old Norse the common language of the Germanic peoples who 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 Bokmal 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 or continental Scandinavian while Icelandic and Faroese are classified as insular Scandinavian Although the written languages are compatible spoken Danish is distinctly different from Norwegian and Swedish and thus the degree of mutual intelligibility with either is variable between regions and speakers 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 the printing press 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 almost disappeared though regional variants of the standard language exist The main differences in language are between generations with youth language being particularly innovative Danish has a very large vowel inventory consisting of 27 phonemically distinctive vowels 9 and its prosody is characterized by the distinctive phenomenon stod a kind of laryngeal phonation type Due to the many pronunciation differences that set Danish apart from its neighboring languages particularly the vowels difficult prosody and weakly pronounced consonants it is sometimes considered to be a difficult language to learn acquire and understand 10 11 and some evidence shows that children are slower to acquire the phonological distinctions of Danish compared to other languages 12 The grammar is moderately inflective with strong irregular and weak regular conjugations and inflections Nouns and demonstrative pronouns distinguish common and neutral gender Like English Danish only has remnants of a former case system particularly in the pronouns Unlike English it has lost all person marking on verbs Its word order is V2 with the finite verb always occupying the second slot in the sentence Contents 1 Classification 1 1 Vocabulary 1 2 Mutual intelligibility 2 History 2 1 Runic Danish 2 2 Old and Middle dialects 2 3 Early Modern 2 4 Standardized national language 3 Geographic distribution and status 3 1 Danish Realm 3 2 Surrounding countries 3 3 Other locations 4 Dialects 5 Phonology 5 1 Vowels 5 2 Consonants 5 3 Prosody 6 Grammar 6 1 Nouns 6 1 1 Gender 6 1 2 Definiteness 6 1 3 Number 6 1 4 Possession 6 1 5 Pronouns 6 1 6 Nominal compounds 6 2 Verbs 6 2 1 Tense aspect mood and voice 6 3 Numerals 6 4 Syntax 6 4 1 Main clauses 6 4 2 Subordinate clauses 7 Writing system and alphabet 8 Research 9 Example text 10 See also 11 References 12 Bibliography 13 External linksClassification EditProto Germanic East Germanic languagesWest Germanic languagesProto Norse Old Norse Old West Norse IcelandicFaroeseNorwegianOld East Norse DanishSwedishDanish and its historical relationships to other North Germanic languages within the Germanic branch of Indo European Another classification can be drawn based on mutual intelligibility Danish is a Germanic language of the North Germanic branch Other names for this group are the Nordic 13 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 14 15 Scandinavian languages are often considered a dialect continuum where no sharp dividing lines are seen between the different vernacular languages 14 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 14 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 14 Contemporary Scanian is fully mutually intelligible with Swedish and less so with Danish since it shares a standardized vocabulary and less distinct pronunciations with the rest of Sweden than in the past Blekinge and Halland the two other provinces further away from Copenhagen that transitioned to Sweden in the 17th century speak dialects more similar to standard Swedish Vocabulary Edit Danish label reading militaerpoliti military police on a police vehicle 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 16 Danish has also absorbed a large 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 as Low German was the other official language of Denmark Norway 17 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 aede 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 texts of 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 17 Danish and English are both Germanic languages Danish is a North Germanic language descended from Old Norse and English is a West Germanic language descended from Old English 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 commonly used Danish nouns and prepositions such as have over under for give flag salt and kat are easily recognizable in their written form to English speakers 18 Similarly some other words are almost identical to their Scots equivalents e g kirke Scots kirk i e church or barn Scots 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 Mutual intelligibility Edit 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 the mutual intelligibility is asymmetric 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 19 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 20 Among younger Danes Copenhageners are worse at understanding Swedish than Danes from the provinces In general younger Danes are not as good at understanding the neighboring languages as are Norwegian and Swedish youths 19 History EditMain article History of Danish The Danish philologist Johannes Brondum Nielsen divided the history of Danish into a period from 800 AD to 1525 to be Old Danish which he subdivided into Runic Danish 800 1100 Early Middle Danish 1100 1350 and Late Middle Danish 1350 1525 21 Runic Danish Edit Main article Old Norse The approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century Old West Norse dialect Old East Norse dialect Old Gutnish dialect Old English Crimean Gothic Other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility Modir Dyggva var Drott dottir Danps konungs sonar Rigs er fyrstr var konungr kalladr a danska tungu Dyggvi s mother was Drott the daughter of king Danp Rig s son who was the first to be called king in the Danish tongue Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson 22 By the eighth 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 mal Norse was written in the runic alphabet first with the elder futhark and from the 9th century with the younger futhark 23 From the seventh 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 24 A change that separated Old East Norse Runic Swedish Danish from Old West Norse was the change of the diphthong aei Old West Norse ei to the monophthong e as in staein to sten This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read stain and the later stin Also a change of au as in daudr into o as in dodr occurred This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from tauthr into tuthr Moreover the oy Old West Norse ey diphthong changed into o 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 25 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 and 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 knife kniv husband husbond and egg aeg 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 26 Old and Middle dialects Edit Fangaer man saar i hor seng maeth annaens mansz kunae oc kumaer han burt liuaend If one catches someone in the whore bed with another man s wife and he comes away alive Jutlandic Law 1241 27 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 28 Throughout this period Danish was in contact with Low German and many Low German loan words were introduced in this period 29 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 Also in this period Danish began to take on the linguistic traits that differentiate it from Swedish and Norwegian such as the stod the voicing of many stop consonants and the weakening of many final vowels to e 30 The first printed book in Danish dates from 1495 the Rimkroniken Rhyming Chronicle a history book told in rhymed verses 31 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 32 Early Modern Edit Herrer og Narre have frit Sprog Lords and jesters have free speech Peder Syv proverbs Following the first Bible translation the development of Danish as a written language as a language of religion administration and public discourse accelerated In the second half of the 17th century grammarians elaborated grammars of Danish first among them Rasmus Bartholin s 1657 Latin grammar De studio lingvae danicae 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 Major authors from this period are Thomas Kingo poet and psalmist and Leonora Christina Ulfeldt whose novel Jammersminde Remembered Woes is considered a literary masterpiece by scholars Orthography was still not standardized and the principles for doing so were vigorously discussed among Danish philologists The grammar of Jens Pedersen Hoysgaard was the first to give a detailed analysis of Danish phonology and prosody including a description of the stod 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 33 The East Danish provinces were lost to Sweden after the Second Treaty of Bromsebro 1645 after which they were gradually Swedified just as Norway was politically severed from Denmark beginning 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 Danish 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 likely 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 34 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 continued to develop 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 until the mid 20th century 33 Standardized national language Edit Moders navn er vort Hjertesprog kun los er al fremmed Tale Det alene i mund og bog kan vaekke et folk af dvale Mother s name is our hearts tongue only idle is all foreign speech It alone in mouth or in book can rouse a people from sleep N F S Grundtvig Modersmaalet 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 Soren Kierkegaard and prolific fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen 35 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 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 Language shift in the 19th century in southern Schleswig After the Schleswig referendum in 1920 a number of Danes remained as a minority within German territories 36 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 a 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 Copenhagen 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 37 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 Copenhagen Standard associated with elderly well to do and well educated people of the capital and low Copenhagen speech traditionally associated with the working class but today adopted as the prestige variety of the younger generations 38 39 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 38 Geographic distribution and status EditDanish Realm Edit Within the Danish Realm 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 speaks 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 Iceland was a territory ruled by Denmark Norway one of whose official languages was Danish 40 About 10 of the population of Greenland speak Danish as their first language owing to immigration 5 No law stipulates an official language for Denmark making Danish the de facto official language only The Code of Civil Procedure does however lay down Danish as the language of the courts 41 Since 1997 public authorities have been obliged to observe the official spelling by way of the Orthography Law In the 21st century discussions have been held regarding creating a language law that would make Danish the official language of Denmark 42 Surrounding countries Edit Learn Danish banner in Flensburg Germany where it is an officially recognized regional language In addition a noticeable community of Danish speakers is in Southern Schleswig the portion of Germany bordering Denmark and a Danish dialect is spoken in the area Since 2015 Schleswig Holstein has officially recognized Danish as a regional language 6 7 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 43 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 43 The more widespread of the two varieties of written Norwegian Bokmal is very close to Danish because standard Danish was used as the de facto administrative language until 1814 and one of the official languages of Denmark Norway Bokmal 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 14 Other locations Edit There are also Danish emigrant communities in other places of the world who still use the language in some form In the Americas Danish speaking communities can be found in the US Canada Argentina and Brazil 8 Dialects Edit Map of Danish dialects A map showing the distribution of stod in Danish dialects Dialects in the pink areas have stod as in standard Danish while those in the green ones have tones as in Swedish and Norwegian Dialects in the blue areas have like Icelandic German and English neither stod nor tones The distribution of one two and three grammatical genders in Danish dialects In Zealand the transition from three to two genders has happened fairly recently West of the red line the definite article goes before the word as in English or German east of the line it takes the form of a suffix 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 which has resulted in a very homogeneous national speech norm 37 14 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 44 37 Danish traditional dialects are divided into three main dialect areas Insular Danish omal including dialects of the Danish islands of Zealand Funen Lolland Falster and Mon 45 Jutlandic jysk further divided in North East West and South Jutlandic 46 Bornholmian bornholmsk the dialect of the island of Bornholm 47 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 Mon and Lolland Falster dialect areas each with addition internal variation The term Eastern Danish 48 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 in phonology grammar and vocabulary from standard Danish Phonologically one of the most diagnostic differences is the presence or absence of stod 49 Four main regional variants for the realization of stod are known In Southeastern Jutlandic Southernmost Funen Southern Langeland and AEro no stod is used but instead a pitch accent South of a line Danish Stodgraensen The Stod border going through central South Jutland crossing Southern Funen and central Langeland and north of Lolland Falster Mon Southern Zealand and Bornholm neither stod nor pitch accent exists 50 Most of Jutland and on Zealand use stod and in Zealandic traditional dialects and regional language stod occurs more often than in the standard language In Zealand the stod line divides Southern Zealand without stod 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 51 52 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 47 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 53 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 far unger literally The cat he is having kittens because cat is a masculine noun thus is referred to as han he even if it is female cat 54 Phonology Edit source source source Spoken Standard Danish of a male born 1978 in Esbjerg Main article Danish phonology The sound system of Danish is unusual 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 perceive the different sounds of the speech flow 10 11 These factors taken together make Danish pronunciation difficult to master for learners and Danish children are indicated to take slightly longer in learning to segment speech in early childhood 12 Vowels Edit Although somewhat depending on analysis most modern variants of Danish distinguish 12 long vowels 13 short vowels and two schwa vowels e 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 55 At least 19 different diphthongs also occur all with a short first vowel and the second segment being either j w or ɐ 56 The table below shows the approximate distribution of the vowels as given by Gronnum 1998a in Modern Standard Danish with the symbols used in IPA Danish Questions of analysis may give a slightly different inventory for example based on whether r colored vowels are considered distinct phonemes Basboll 2005 50 gives 25 full vowels not counting the two unstressed schwa vowels Front Central Backunrounded rounded unrounded unrounded roundedClose i iː y yː u uːNear close e e ːClose mid e eː o oː o oːMid eOpen mid ɛ ɛː œ œː ʌ ɔ ɔːNear open ae œ œ ː ɐOpen ɶ ɑ ɑː ɒ ɒːConsonants Edit The consonant inventory is comparatively simple Basboll 2005 73 distinguishes 16 non syllabic consonant phonemes in Danish Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Pharyngeal 57 GlottalNasal m n ŋStop p b t d k ɡFricative f s hApproximant v l j ʁMany of these phonemes have quite different allophones in onset and coda where intervocalic consonants followed by a full vowel are treated as in onset otherwise as in coda 58 Phonetically there is no voicing distinction among the stops rather the distinction is one of aspiration and fortis vs lenis 56 p t k are aspirated in onset realized as pʰ tsʰ kʰ but not in coda The pronunciation of t tsʰ is in between a simple aspirated tʰ and a fully affricated tsʰ as has happened in German with the second High German consonant shift from t to z There is dialectal variation and some Jutlandic dialects may be less affricated than other varieties with Northern and Western Jutlandic traditional dialects having an almost unaspirated dry t 59 v is pronounced as a w in syllable coda so e g ɡraːve grave is pronounced kʁɑːwe 60 ʋ d often have slight frication but are usually pronounced as approximants Danish d differs from the similar sound in English and Icelandic in that it is not a dental fricative but an alveolar approximant which is frequently heard as l by second language learners 56 The sound ɕ is found for example in the word sjovˀ fun pronounced ɕɒwˀ and tjalˀ marijuana pronounced tɕaelˀ 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 61 Jutlandic dialects often lack the sound ɕ and pronounce the sj cluster as sj or sc 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 ɐ 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 realization of r as guttural the so called skarre r distinguishes the language from those varieties of Norwegian and Swedish that use trilled r Only very few middle aged or elderly speakers of Jutlandic retain a frontal r which is then usually realised as a flapped ɾ or approximant ɹ Prosody Edit Danish is characterized by a prosodic feature called stod 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 62 It has phonemic status since it serves as the sole distinguishing feature of words with different meanings in minimal pairs such as bonder peasants with stod versus bonner beans without stod The distribution of stod in the vocabulary is related to the distribution of the common Scandinavian pitch accents found in most dialects of Norwegian and Swedish 63 Stress is phonemic and distinguishes words such as billigst ˈpilist cheapest and bilist piˈlist car driver 64 Danish intonation has been described by Nina Gronnum as a hierarchical model where components such as the stress group sentence type and prosodic phrase are combined and where the stress group is the main intonation unit and in Copenhagen Standard Danish mainly has a certain pitch pattern that reaches its lowest peak on the stressed syllable followed by its highest peak on the following unstressed syllable after which it declines gradually until the next stress group 65 The stod is also dependent on stress while some varieties also realize it primarily as a tone 66 There are also various studies on specific interactional phenomena in Danish focusing on pitch such as Mikkelsen amp Kragelund on ways to mark the end of a story 67 and Steensig 2001 on turn taking 68 Grammar EditMain article Danish 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 or umlaut i e changing the vowel of the stem as in the pairs tager tog takes took and fod fodder 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 Typical 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 onomatopoeia 69 Nouns Edit 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 Nordic languages including Danish is that the definite articles which also mark noun gender have developed into suffixes Typical of Germanic languages plurals are either irregular or strong stems inflected through umlaut i e changing the vowel of the stem e g fod fodder foot feet mand maend man men or weak stems inflected through affixation e g skib skibe ship ships kvinde kvinder woman women 70 Gender Edit Main article Gender in Danish and Swedish 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 71 Definiteness Edit Danish regular plural patterns Class 1 Class 2 Class 3Sg Pl Pl definite Sg Pl Pl definite Sg Pl Pl definite maned month maneder months manederne the months dag day dage days dagene the days ar year ar years arene the yearsbil car biler cars bilerne the cars hund dog hunde dogs hundene the dogs fisk fish fisk fish pl fiskene the fishesDefiniteness is marked by two mutually exclusive articles either a postposed enclitic or a preposed article which is the obligatory way to mark definiteness when nouns are modified by an adjective 72 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 71 73 Indefinite Jeg sa et hus I saw a house Definite with enclitic article Jeg sa huset I saw the house Definite with preposed demonstrative article Jeg sa det store hus nb 1 I saw the big house The plural definite ending is e ne e g drenge boys gt drengene the boys and piger girls gt pigerne the girls and nouns ending in ere lose the last e before adding the ne suffix e g danskere Danes gt 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 74 73 Note here that in Swedish and Norwegian the preposed and the enclitic article occur together e g det store huset whereas in Danish the enclitic article is replaced by the preposed demonstrative Number Edit Danish irregular plurals Sg Pl Pl definitemand man maend men maendene the menko cow koer cows koerne the cowsoje eye ojne eyes ojnene the eyeskonto account konti accounts kontiene the accountsThere are three different types of regular plurals Class 1 forms the plural with the suffix er indefinite and erne definite Class 2 with the suffix e indefinite and ene definite and Class 3 takes no suffix for the plural indefinite form and ene for the plural definite 75 Most irregular nouns have an ablaut plural i e 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 oje eye which is the old dual form ojne 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 76 77 Possession Edit 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 78 This is however not an example 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 Danmarks bolsjefabrik the king of Denmark s candy factory where the factory is owned by the king of Denmark 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 79 80 Pronouns Edit Danish personal pronouns Person Nominative case Objective case Possessive case adjective1st p sg jeg I mig me min mit mine my mine2nd p sg du You dig you din dit dine your s 3rd p sg han hun den det he she it ham hende den det him her it hans hendes dens dets his her s its1st p pl vi we os us vores our s 2nd p pl I you pl jer you pl jeres your s pl 3rd p pl de they dem them deres their s 3rd p ref N A sig him her itself themself selves sin sit sine his her s its own As does English the Danish pronominal system retains a distinction between nominative and oblique case The nominative form of pronouns is used when pronouns occur as grammatical subject of a sentence and only when non coordinated and without a following modifier 81 and oblique forms are used for all non subject functions including direct and indirect object predicative comparative and other types of constructions The third person singular pronouns also distinguish between animate masculine han he animate feminine hun she forms as well as inanimate neuter det it and inanimate common gender den it 82 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 uses but the same form 83 The form is used both adjectivally preceding a possessed noun det er min hest it is my horse and independently in place of the possessed noun den er min it is mine In the third person singular sin is used when the possessor is also the subject of the sentence whereas hans his hendes her and dens dets its is used when the possessor is different from the grammatical subject 84 85 Han tog sin hat He took his own hat Han tog hans hat He took his hat someone else s hat Nominal compounds Edit Like all Germanic languages Danish forms compound nouns These are represented in Danish orthography as one word as in kvindehandboldlandsholdet the female national handball team In some cases nouns are joined with s as a linking element 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 the linking element e instead like gaestebog from gaest and bog meaning guest book There are also irregular linking elements Verbs Edit infinitive Present Pastat vaere to be er is are am var was wereat se to see ser sees sa sawat vide to know ved knows vidste knewat huske to remember husker remembers huskede rememberedat glemme to forget glemmer forgets glemte forgotDanish 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 86 Tense aspect mood and voice Edit Verbs can be divided into two main classes the strong irregular verbs and the regular weak verbs 72 The regular verbs are also divided into two classes those that take the past suffix te and those that take the suffix ede 87 The infinitive always ends in a vowel usually e pronounced e infinitive forms are preceded by the article at pronounced ɒ in some syntactic functions 87 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 88 The present participle ends in ende e g lobende running and the past participle ends in et e g lobet run t e g kobt bought The Perfect is constructed with at have to have and participial forms like in English But some transitive verbs form the perfect using at vaere to be instead and some may use both with a difference in meaning Hun har gaet Flyet har flojet She has walked The plane has flown Hun er gaet Flyet er flojet She has left The plane has taken off Hun havde gaet Flyet havde flojet She had walked The plane had flown Hun var gaet Flyet var flojet She had left The plane had taken offThe passive form takes the suffix s avisen laeses hver dag the newspaper is read every day Another passive construction uses the auxiliary verb at blive to become avisen bliver laest hver dag 88 89 The imperative form is the infinitive without the final schwa vowel with stod potentially being applied depending on syllable structure lob run Numerals Edit The numerals are formed on the basis of a vigesimal system with various rules 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 1 1 2 literally half second implying one plus half of the second one The numerals halvtredje 2 1 2 halvfjerde 3 1 2 and halvfemte 4 1 2 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 that the numerals 50 60 70 80 and 90 are as are 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 may still be 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 90 while thirty is tredive Old Danish thrjatiughu three tens and forty is fyrre Old Danish fyritiughu four tens 91 still used today as the archaism fyrretyve 92 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 twenties Cardinal numeral Danish Literal translation Ordinal numeral Danish Literal translation1 en et one 1st forste first12 tolv twelve 12th tolvte twelfth23 treogtyve three and twenty 23rd treogtyvende three and 20th34 fireogtredive four and thirty 34th fireogtred i vte four and 30th45 femogfyrre tyve five and forty four tens 45th femogfyrretyvende five and four tens th56 seksoghalvtreds indstyve six and two score plus half of the third score 56th seksoghalvtredsindstyvende six and two score plus half of the third score th67 syvogtres indstyve seven and three score 67th syvogtresindstyvende seven and three score th78 otteoghalvfjerds indstyve eight and three score plus half of the fourth score 78th otteoghalvfjerdsindstyvende eight and three score plus half of the fourth score th89 niogfirs indstyve nine and four score 89th niogfirsindstyvende nine and four score th90 halvfems indstyve four score plus half of the fifth score 90th halvfemsindstyvende four score plus half of the fifth score thFor 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 Syntax Edit Danish basic constituent order in simple sentences with both a subject and an object is Subject Verb Object 93 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 94 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 foundation 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 95 Peter S sa V Jytte O Peter saw Jytte but I gar sa 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 dummy subject der 96 der kom en pige ind ad doren there came a girl in through the door A girl came in the door Main clauses Edit 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 skaenket en tanke i arevisAnd him had Per not given a thought for years0 1 2 3 4 5 6 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 finite 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 95 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 sa hun whom saw she whom did she see sa hun ham saw she him did she see him Subordinate clauses Edit In subordinate clauses the word order 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 97 Complement clauses begin with the particle at in the connector field Han sagde at han ikke ville ga he said that he not would go He said that he did not want to go Relative clauses are marked by the relative pronouns som or der which occupy the preverbal slot Jeg kender en mand som bor i Helsingor 98 I know a man who lives in Elsinore Writing system and alphabet EditMain article Danish orthography Danish keyboard with keys for AE O and A The oldest preserved examples of written Danish from the Iron and Viking Ages are in the Runic alphabet 99 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 conservative using most of the conventions established in the 16th century The spoken language however has changed a lot since then creating a gap between the spoken and written languages 100 Since 1955 Dansk Sprognaevn has been the official language council in Denmark The modern Danish alphabet is similar to the English one with three additional letters ae o and a which come at the end of the alphabet in that order The letters c q w x and z are only used in loan words A spelling reform in 1948 introduced the letter a already in use in Norwegian and Swedish into the Danish alphabet to replace the digraph aa 99 The old usage continues to occur 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 same sound a aa is treated like a in alphabetical sorting though it appears to be two letters When the letters are not available due to technical limitations they are often replaced by ae for ae oe or o for o and aa for a 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 particularly with the phonetic spelling of loanwords 101 for example the spelling of station and garage in Danish remains identical to other languages whereas in Norwegian they are transliterated as stasjon and garasje Research EditDanish is a well studied language and multiple universities in Denmark have departments devoted to Danish or linguistics with active research projects on the language such as the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen 102 and there are many dictionaries and technological resources on the language The language council Dansk Sprognaevn also publishes research on the language both nationally and internationally 103 There are also research centers focusing specifically on the dialects The Peter Skautrup center at Aarhus University describes the dialects and varieties of the Jutlandic peninsula and is working on a dictionary of Jutlandic 104 while the Center for Dialect Research at University of Copenhagen works on the Insular Danish varieties 105 The Puzzle of Danish a research project at Aarhus University funded by the Danish Research Council investigates whether the challenging sound structure of Danish has an impact on how native speakers process and produce Danish language Their findings suggest that native speaker of Danish tend to use contextual cues to process Danish sounds and sentences more than native speakers of other comparable languages and that they produce more lexically syntactically and semantically redundant language in conversation 106 Multiple corpora of Danish language data are available The Danish Gigaword project provides a curated corpus of a billion words 107 KorpusDK is a corpus of written texts in Danish 108 There are also a number of conversations available in SamtaleBanken the Danish part of TalkBank 109 110 Academic descriptions of the language are published both in Danish and English The most complete grammar is the Grammatik over det Danske Sprog Grammar over the Danish Language by Erik Hansen amp Lars Heltoft and it is written in Danish and contains over 1800 pages 111 Multiple phonologies have been written most importantly by Basboll 112 and Gronnum 65 based on work that used to take place at the former Institute of Phonetics at the University of Copenhagen Example text EditArticle 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Danish Alle mennesker er fodt frie og lige i vaerdighed og rettigheder De er udstyret med fornuft og samvittighed og de bor handle mod hverandre i en broderskabets and 113 Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood 114 See also EditRealm languages Faroese GreenlandicNordic languages Icelandic Norwegian SwedishReferences Edit a b dansk Den Danske Ordbog ordnet dk Insular Danish at Ethnologue 18th ed 2015 subscription required Jutlandic at Ethnologue 18th ed 2015 subscription required Hammarstrom Harald Forkel Robert Haspelmath Martin Bank Sebastian 24 May 2022 Older Runic Glottolog Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Archived from the original on 13 November 2022 Retrieved 13 November 2022 Hammarstrom Harald Forkel Robert Haspelmath Martin eds 2017 Danish language Glottolog 3 0 Jena Germany Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History a b Frederiksen amp Olsen 2017 a b 82b LVwG Regional und Minderheitensprachen vor Behorden Gesetze des Bundes und der Lander www lexsoft de Retrieved 20 December 2022 a b Nygaard Jorgen Moller Ernst 14 May 2015 Dansk er blevet officielt sprog i Slesvig TV SYD in Danish Retrieved 20 December 2022 a b Kuhl Petersen amp Hansen 2020 Haberland 1994 p 318 a b Gronnum 2008a a b Gronnum 2008b a b Trecca et al 2020 Vikor 2002 a b c d e f Torp 2006 Rischel 2012 pp 809 810 Haberland 1994 pp 346 347 a b Jervelund Anita Agerup 2008 Antal arveord og laneord Dansk Sprognaevns svarbase Bredsdorff 1958 pp 6 10 a b Akesson 2005 Torp 2006 pp 70 72 Howe 1996 Ynglinga saga heimskringla no heimskringla no Faarlund 1994 pp 38 41 Faarlund 1994 p 39 Faarlund 1994 p 41 Viking place names and language in England Viking no Retrieved 22 September 2013 Pedersen 1996 p 220 Pedersen 1996 pp 219 221 Pedersen 1996 pp 221 224 Torp 2006 pp 57 58 Bog Museum Book Museum Royal Danish Library Archived from the original on 21 December 2014 Pedersen 1996 p 225 a b Pedersen 1996 Torp 2006 p 52 Rischel 2012 p 828 Rischel 2012 p 831 a b c Pedersen 2003 a b Kristiansen amp Jorgensen 2003 Quist P 2006 lavkobenhavnsk dialekt ku dk Jacobsen 2003 Rischel 2012 pp 822 823 Heltoft amp Preisler 2007 a b Nordic language co operation Nordic Council Archived from the original on 7 February 2013 Retrieved 1 January 2013 Kristiansen 1998 Omal Copenhagen University Center for Dialect Research 24 April 2015 Archived from the original on 29 December 2017 Retrieved 27 June 2016 Nielsen 1959 a b Prince 1924 danske dialekter Gyldendal Den Store Danske in Danish Denstoredanske dk Retrieved 22 September 2013 Sorensen 2011 Stod University of Copenhagen Center for Dialect Studies 22 April 2015 Ejskjaer 1990 Kroman 1980 Arboe 2008 Navneordenes kon Copenhagen University Center for Dialect Research 22 April 2015 Haberland 1994 p 319 a b c Haberland 1994 p 320 Basboll 2005 p 130 Basboll 2005 p 43 Puggaard 2021 Basboll 2005 p 64 Gronnum 2005 pp 305 306 Fischer Jorgensen 1989 Basboll 2005 pp 83 86 Rischel 2012 p 811 a b Gronnum 1998b Kyst 2008 Mikkelsen amp Kragelund 2015 Steensig 2001 Becker Christensen 2010 p 17 Haberland 1994 pp 323 331 a b Haberland 1994 p 323 324 a b Rischel 2012 p 813 a b Lundskaer Nielsen amp Holmes 2015 p 61 68 Haberland 1994 p 330 Haberland 1994 p 325 326 Haberland 1994 p 326 Lundskaer Nielsen amp Holmes 2015 p 35 40 Herslund 2001 Haberland 1994 p 325 Lundskaer Nielsen amp Holmes 2015 p 53 60 Herslund 2002 p 49 Haberland 1994 p 326 328 Allan Lundskaer Nielsen amp Holmes 2005 p 61 Allan Lundskaer Nielsen amp Holmes 2005 p 63 Bredsdorff 1958 pp 83 85 Haberland 1994 p 331 a b Haberland 1994 p 332 a b Haberland 1994 p 333 Rischel 2012 p 814 tyve 4 ODS ordnet dk Morch Ida Elisabeth 21 October 2009 de danske tal halvtreds sproget dk in Danish Dansk Sprognaevn Retrieved 17 December 2021 Haberland 1994 p 348 Becker Christensen 2010 p 24 Diderichsen 1974 a b Haberland 1994 p 336 Haberland 1994 p 344 Jensen 2011 Haberland 1994 p 345 a b Rischel 2012 p 815 Rischel 2012 p 820 Waddingham amp Ritter 2014 pp 243 244 The Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen lingvistkredsen ku dk University of Copenhagen 16 November 2012 Retrieved 12 December 2021 Udgivelser in Danish Dansk Sprognaevn Retrieved 14 December 2021 Peter Skautrup Centeret jysk au dk in Danish Aarhus University Retrieved 14 December 2021 Center for Dialektforskning nors ku dk in Danish Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics 23 June 2008 Retrieved 14 December 2021 Trecca 2021 Stromberg Derczynski 2020 KorpusDK ordnet dk Det Danske Sprog og Litteraturselskab Retrieved 14 December 2021 SamtaleBank samtalebank talkbank org TalkBank org Retrieved 12 December 2021 MacWhinney amp Wagner 2010 Hansen amp Heltoft 2011 Basboll 2005 Universal Declaration of Human Rights ohchr org Universal Declaration of Human Rights United Nations Bibliography EditAkesson K L 2005 Haller spraket ihop Norden en forskningsrapport om ungdomars forstaelse av danska svenska och norska Nordic Council of Ministers Allan Robin Lundskaer Nielsen Tom Holmes Philip 2005 Danish An essential grammar Routledge Arboe Torben 2008 Pronominal repraesentation i danske dialekter PDF 12 Mode om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog pp 29 38 Archived from the original PDF on 18 May 2015 Basboll Hans 2005 The Phonology of Danish Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 824268 0 Becker Christensen Christian 2010 Dansk syntaks Samfundslitteratur Bleses D Vach W Slott M Wehberg S Thomsen P Madsen T O Basboll H 2008 Early vocabulary development in Danish and other languages A CDI based comparison Journal of Child Language 35 3 619 650 doi 10 1017 s0305000908008714 PMID 18588717 S2CID 30992551 Bredsdorff Elias 1958 Danish an elementary grammar and reader Cambridge University Press Diderichsen Paul 1974 Elementaer dansk grammatik 3rd ed Kobenhavn Gyldendal Ejskjaer Inger 1990 Stod and pitch accents in the Danish dialects Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 22 1 49 75 doi 10 1080 03740463 1990 10411522 Faarlund Jan Terje 1994 Old and Middle Scandinavian In Konig Ekkehard van der Auwera Johan eds The Germanic Languages Routledge Language Family Descriptions Routledge pp 39 71 ISBN 978 0 415 28079 2 JSTOR 4176538 Frederiksen Katti Olsen Carl Christian 2017 Det gronlandske sprog i dag PDF Saammaateqatigiinnissamut Isumalioqatigiissitaq Archived from the original PDF on 9 May 2018 Retrieved 17 December 2021 Fischer Jorgensen Eli 1989 Phonetic analysis of the stod in standard Danish Phonetica 46 1 3 1 59 doi 10 1159 000261828 PMID 2608724 S2CID 3227109 Gregersen Frans Holmen Anne Kristiansen Tore Moller Erik Pedersen Inge Lise Steensig Jakob Ulbaek lb eds 1996 Dansk Sproglaere Danish Language studies in Danish Dansklaererforeningen Gronnum Nina 1998b Intonation in Danish In Hirst Daniel Cristo Albert Di eds Intonation Systems Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 131 151 ISBN 9780521395137 Gronnum Nina 1998a Illustrations of the IPA Danish Journal of the International Phonetic Association 28 1 amp 2 99 105 doi 10 1017 s0025100300006290 S2CID 249412109 Gronnum Nina 2005 Fonetik og fonologi Almen og Dansk Phonetics and Phonology general and Danish in Danish 3rd ed Copenhagen Akademisk Forlag ISBN 978 87 500 3865 8 Gronnum Nina 2008a Hvad er det saerlige ved dansk som gor det svaert at forsta og at udtale for andre Forste del enkeltlydene What is the peculiarity of Danish that makes it difficult for others to understand and pronounce First part Segmentary sounds Mal og Maele 31 1 15 20 Gronnum Nina 2008b Hvad er det saerlige ved dansk som gor det svaert at forsta og at udtale for andre Anden del prosodi What is the peculiarity of Danish that makes it difficult for others to understand and pronounce Second part Prosody Mal og Maele in Danish 31 2 19 23 Haberland Hartmut 1994 Danish In Konig Ekkehard van der Auwera Johan eds The Germanic Languages Routledge Language Family Descriptions Routledge pp 313 349 ISBN 978 0 415 28079 2 JSTOR 4176538 Hansen Erik Heltoft Lars 2011 Grammatik over det Danske Sprog 1st ed Odense Syddansk Universitetsforlag ISBN 9788775330089 Hansen Aage 1943 Stodet i dansk The Stod in Danish De Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab Historisk Filologiske Meddelelser in Danish Vol XXIX Copenhagen Munksgaard Heltoft Lars Preisler Bent 2007 Sigtet med en sproglov Sprogforum 4 Herslund Michael 2001 The Danish s genitive From affix to clitic Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 33 1 7 18 doi 10 1080 03740463 2001 10412193 S2CID 144030730 Herslund Michael 2002 Danish Munchen Lincom Europa ISBN 3895863963 Howe Stephen 1996 Old Middle Danish The Personal Pronouns in the Germanic Languages A Study of Personal Pronoun Morphology and Change in the Germanic Languages from the First Records to the Present Day Walter de Gruyter Jensen Torben Juel 2011 Ordstilling i ledsaetninger i moderne dansk grammatik Ny Forskning i Grammatik 18 123 150 Jacobsen Birgitte 2003 Colonial Danish International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2003 159 153 164 doi 10 1515 ijsl 2003 004 Jespersen Otto 1906 Modersmalets fonetik The phonetics of the Mothertongue in Danish Schuboth Kristiansen Tore 1998 The role of standard ideology in the disappearance of the traditional Danish dialects Folia Linguistica 32 1 2 115 130 doi 10 1515 flin 1998 32 1 2 115 S2CID 143911692 Kristiansen T Jorgensen J N 2003 The sociolinguistics of Danish International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2003 159 1 doi 10 1515 ijsl 2003 006 Kroman E 1980 Debat Stod og accentomrader og deres oprindelse Stod and accent areas and their origins Fortid og Nutid 1 in Danish Kuhl Karoline Petersen Jan Heegard Hansen Gert Foget 2020 The Corpus of American Danish a language resource of spoken immigrant Danish in North and South America Language Resources and Evaluation 54 3 831 849 doi 10 1007 s10579 019 09473 5 S2CID 201873487 Kyst Bodil 2008 Trykgruppens toner i arhusiansk regiolekt Danske Talesprog 9 1 64 Lundskaer Nielsen Tom Holmes Philip 2015 Danish A comprehensive grammar 2nd ed Routledge MacWhinney Brian Wagner Johannes 2010 Transcribing searching and data sharing The CLAN software and the TalkBank data repository PDF Gesprachsforschung 11 154 173 PMC 4257135 PMID 25484851 Archived PDF from the original on 11 July 2016 Retrieved 12 December 2021 Mikkelsen Nicholas Kragelund Mathias Hoyer 2015 Exaggerated pitch as a story ending device PDF Skrifter om Samtalegrammatik 2 3 ISSN 2445 7256 Archived PDF from the original on 20 October 2020 Nielsen Niels Age 1959 De jyske Dialekter Copenhagen Gyldendal Pedersen Inge Lise 1996 Sprogsamfundets Historie In Gregersen Frans Holmen Anne Kristiansen Tore Moller Erik Pedersen Inge Lise Steensig Jakob Ulbaek lb eds Dansk Sproglaere Dansklaererforeningen Pedersen Inge Lise 2003 Traditional dialects of Danish and the de dialectalization 1900 2000 The Sociolinguistics of Danish International Journal of the Sociology of Language pp 159 9 Prince John Dyneley 1924 The Danish Dialect of Bornholm Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 63 2 190 207 Puggaard Rasmus 2021 Modeling regional variation in voice onset time of Jutlandic varieties of Danish In Van de Velde Hans Hilton Nanna Haug Knooihuizen Remco eds Language Variation European Perspectives VIII Amsterdam John Benjains pp 80 110 ISBN 9789027259820 Retrieved 10 December 2021 Rischel Jorgen 2012 Danish Revue Belge de Philologie et d Histoire 90 3 809 832 doi 10 3406 rbph 2012 8263 Steensig Jakob 2001 Sprog i virkeligheden bidrag til en interaktionel lingvistik Aarhus Aarhus University Press ISBN 9788772888736 Stromberg Derczynski Leon et al 2020 The Danish gigaword project arXiv 2005 03521 cs CL Sorensen V 2011 Lyd og prosodi i de klassiske danske dialekter Sound and prosody in the classical Danish dialects PDF in Danish Peter Skautrup Centret Archived from the original PDF on 18 May 2015 Torp Arne 2006 Nordiske sprog i fortid og nutid Sproglighed og sprogforskelle sprogfamilier og sprogslaegtskab Nordic languages in past and present Language and language diversity language families and linguistic relatedness Nordens Sprog med rodder og fodder The languages of the Nordic countries with roots and feet PDF in Danish Nordens Sprograd Archived PDF from the original on 4 March 2016 Trecca Fabio Bleses Dorthe Hojen Anders Madsen Thomas O Christiansen Morten H 3 January 2020 When Too Many Vowels Impede Language Processing An Eye Tracking Study of Danish Learning Children Language and Speech SAGE Publications 63 4 898 918 doi 10 1177 0023830919893390 ISSN 0023 8309 PMID 31898932 S2CID 147513872 Trecca Fabio 2021 Danish as a Window Onto Language Processing and Learning PDF Language Learning 71 3 799 833 doi 10 1111 lang 12450 S2CID 233707119 Archived PDF from the original on 27 October 2022 Vikor Lars 2002 The Nordic language area and the languages in the north of Europe In Bandle Oskar Braunmuller Kurt Jahr Ernst Hakon Karker Allan Naumann Hans Peter Telefon Ulf eds The Nordic Languages I Berlin New York Walter de Gruyter doi 10 1515 9783110197051 002 ISBN 9783110197051 Waddingham Anne Ritter R M 2014 New Hart s rules the Oxford style guide Oxford UK Oxford University Press ISBN 9780191649134 OCLC 883571244 External links Edit 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 a website where you can find guidance information and answers to questions about the Danish language and language matters in Denmark in Danish Samtalegrammatik dk parts of a grammar of spoken Danish Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Danish language amp oldid 1129368019, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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