'Danish' (''dansk'') is one of the
North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages), a sub-group of the
Germanic branch of the
Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in
Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of
Schleswig-Holstein in
Germany, where it holds the status of minority language. Danish also holds official status and is a mandatory subject in school in the Danish territories of
Greenland and the
Faroe Islands, which now enjoy limited autonomy. In
Iceland and
Faroe Islands, Danish is, alongside English, a compulsory foreign language taught in schools (although it may be substituted by Swedish or Norwegian). In
North and
South America there are Danish language communities in
Argentina, the
USA and
Canada.
Classification and related languages
Danish, together with Swedish, derives from the East Nordic dialect group, while
Norwegian is classified as a West Nordic language together with
Faroese and
Icelandic. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Scandinavian in two groups: Southern Scandinavian, which is Danish, and Northern Scandinavian, consisting of Norwegian and Swedish. Icelandic and Faroese is placed in a separate ''Insular Scandinavian''. Written Danish and Norwegian
Bokmål are particularly close, though the phonology and prosody make them differ somewhat. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can understand the others, though studies have shown that speakers of Norwegian generally understand both Danish and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand each other. Both Swedes and Danes also understand Norwegian better than they understand each other's languages.
[1]
History
Main articles: History of Danish
In the
8th century, the common
Germanic language of
Scandinavia,
Proto-Norse, had undergone some changes and evolved into
Old Norse. This language began to undergo new changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, which resulted in the appearance of two similar dialects, ''Old West Norse (
Norway and
Iceland) and ''Old East Norse'' (
Denmark and
Sweden).
Old East Norse is in Sweden called ''Runic Swedish'' and in east Denmark ''Runic Danish'', but until the
12th century, the dialect was roughly the same in the two countries. The dialects are called ''runic'' due to the fact that the main body of text appears in the
runic alphabet. Unlike
Proto-Norse, which was written with the
Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the
Younger Futhark alphabet, which only had 16 letters. Due to the limited number of runes, some runes were used for a range of
phonemes, such as the rune for the
vowel ''u'' which was also used for the vowels ''o'', ''ø'' and ''y'', and the rune for ''i'' which was also used for ''e''.
A change that separated Old East Norse (Runic Swedish/Danish) from Old West Norse was the change of the
diphthong ''æi'' (Old West Norse ''ei'') to the
monophthong ''e'', as in ''stæin'' to ''sten''. This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read ''stain'' and the later ''stin''. There was also a change of ''au'' as in ''dauðr'' into ''ø'' as in ''døðr''. This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from ''tauþr'' into ''tuþr''. Moreover, the ''øy'' (Old West Norse ''ey'') diphthong changed into ''ø'' as well, as in the Old Norse word for "island".
Some famous authors of works in Danish are
existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, prolific
fairy tale author
Hans Christian Andersen, and playwright
Ludvig Holberg. Three
20th century Danish authors have become
Nobel Prize laureates in
Literature:
Karl Adolph Gjellerup and
Henrik Pontoppidan (joint recipients in
1917) and
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (awarded
1944).
Danish was once widely spoken in the northeast counties of England. Many Danish derived words such as gate (gade) for street, still survive in
Yorkshire and other parts of eastern England colonized by Danish
Vikings. The city of
York was once the Danish settlement of Jorvik.
The first printed book in Danish dates from
1495. The first complete translation of the
Bible in Danish was published in
1550.
Geographical distribution
Danish is the national language of
Denmark, one of two official languages of
Greenland (the other is
Greenlandic), and one of two official languages of the
Faroes (the other is
Faroese). In addition, there is a small community of Danish speakers in
Southern Schleswig, the portion of
Germany bordering Denmark, where it is an officially recognized
regional language, just as
German is north of the border. Furthermore, Danish is one of the official languages of the
European Union and one of the working languages of the
Nordic Council. Under the
Nordic Language Convention, citizens of the
Nordic countries speaking Danish have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable to any
interpretation or
translation costs.
[1][2]
There is no law stipulating an official language for Denmark, making Danish the
de facto language only. The Code of Civil Procedure does, however, lay down Danish as the language of the courts. Since 1997 public authorities have been obliged to observe the official spelling by way of the Orthography Law.
Dialects
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 of
Copenhagen. Unlike Swedish and Norwegian, Danish does not have more than one regional speech norm. More than 25% of all Danish speakers live in the metropolitan area and most government agencies, institutions and major businesses keep their main offices in Copenhagen, something that has resulted in a very homogeneous national speech norm. In contrast, though
Oslo (Norway) and
Stockholm (Sweden) are quite dominant in terms of speech standards, cities like
Bergen,
Gothenburg and the
Malmö-
Lund region are large and influential enough to create secondary regional norms, making the standard language more varied than is the case with Danish. The general agreement is that Standard Danish is based on a form of Copenhagen dialect, but the specific norm is, as with most language norms, difficult to pinpoint for both laypeople and scholars. Historically Standard Danish emerged as a compromise between the dialect of Zealand and Scania. The first layers of it can be seen in east Danish provincial law texts such as
Skånske Lov, just as we can recognize west Danish in laws from the same ages in
Jyske Lov.
Despite the relative cultural monopoly of the capital and the centralised government, the divided geography of the country allowed distinct rural dialects to flourish during the centuries. Such "genuine"
dialects were formerly spoken by a vast majority of the population, but have declined much since the 1960s. They still exist in communities out on the countryside, but most speakers in these areas generally speak a regionalized form of Standard Danish, when speaking with one who speaks to them in that same standard. Usually an adaptation of the local dialect to ''rigsdansk'' is spoken, though
code-switching between the standard-like norm and a distinct dialect is common.
Danish is divided into three distinct dialect groups:
★
Eastern Danish (''østdansk''), including the
Bornholm,
Scanian and Halland dialects
★
Island Danish (''ømål'' or ''ødansk''), including dialects of Zealand, Funen, Lolland, Falster, and Møn
★
Jutlandic (''jysk''), further divided in North, East, West and
South Jutlandic
Historically, ''Eastern Danish'' includes what is occasionally considered Southern Swedish dialects. The background for this lies in the loss of the originally Danish provinces
Blekinge,
Halland and
Scania to Sweden in 1658. The island Bornholm in the Baltic also belongs to this group, but remained Danish. A few generations ago, the classical dialects spoken in the southern Swedish provinces could still be argued to be more Eastern Danish than Swedish, being similar to the dialect of Bornholm. Today influx of Standard Swedish vocabulary has generally meant that Scanian and Bornholmish are closer to the modern national standards than to each other. The Bornholm dialect has also maintained to this day many ancient features, such as a distinction between three
grammatical genders, which the central Island Danish dialects gave up during the 20th Century. Standard Danish has two genders, and Western Jutlandic only one, similar to English.
Today, Standard Danish is most similar to the Island Danish dialect group.
Sound system
Main articles: Danish phonology
The sound system of Danish is in many ways unique among the world's languages. It is quite prone to considerable reduction and
assimilation of both consonants and vowels even in very formal standard language. A rare feature is the presence of a prosodic feature called ''
stød'' in Danish (lit. "push; thrust"). This is a form of laryngealization or
creaky voice, only occasionally realized as a full
glottal stop (especially in emphatic pronunciation). It can be the only distinguishing feature between certain words, thus creating
minimal pairs (e.g. ''bønder'' "peasants" with stød vs. ''bønner'' "beans" without). The distribution of stød in the lexicon is clearly related to the distribution of the common Scandinavian
tonal word accents found in most dialects of
Norwegian and
Swedish, including the national
standard languages. Most linguists today believe that stød is a development of the word accents, rather than the other way round. Some have theorized it emerged from the overwhelming influence of Low German in medieval times, having flattened the originally Nordic melodic accent, but stød is absent in most southern Danish dialects where Low German impact would have been the greatest. Stød generally occurs in words that have "accent 1" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were monosyllabic in
Old Norse, while no-stød occurs in words that have "accent 2" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were polysyllabic in Old Norse.
Unlike the neighboring Continental Scandinavian languages, the
prosody of Danish does not have phonemic pitch.
Stress is phonemic and distinguishes words
such as ''billigst'' ['bilist] "cheapest" and ''bilist'' [bi'list] "car driver".
Vowels
Modern Standard Danish has 14 vowel
phonemes. All but two of these vowels may be either long and short, with the exceptions being
schwa and . The long and short realizations often differ in
quality and there are several
allophones that differ if they occur together with an . For example, is lowered when it occurs either before or after and is pronounced when it's long.
Consonants
are
devoiced in all contexts. often have slight frication, but are usually pronounced as
approximants. The distinction between , / and is only made in the beginning of a word or at the beginning of a stressed syllable. Hence ''lappe'' and ''labbe'' are rendered . The combination of is realized as a
alveolo-palatal fricative, , making it possible to postulate a tentative -phoneme in Danish. can be described as "tautosyllabic", meaning that it take the form of either a phonetic consonant or vowel. At the beginning of a word, it is pronounced as a
uvular fricative, , but in most other positions it is either realised as a non-syllabic
low central vowel, (which is almost identical to how /r/ is often pronounced in
German) or simply coalesces with the preceding vowel. The phenomenon is also comparable to
non-rhotic pronunciations of English.
Grammar
Main articles: Danish grammar
The infinitive forms of Danish verbs end in a vowel, which in almost all cases is the letter ''e''. Verbs are conjugated according to
tense, but otherwise do not vary according to
person or
number. For example the present tense form of the Danish infinitive verb ''spise'' ("to eat") is ''spiser''; this form is the same regardless of whether the subject is in the first, second, or third person, or whether it is singular or plural. This extreme ease of conjugating verbs is made up for by the many
irregular verbs in the language.
Standard Danish nouns fall into only two grammatical genders: ''common'' and ''neuter'', while some dialects still often have ''masculine'', ''feminine'' and ''neuter''. West Jutlandic has only one gender, but has developed a distinction between countable and uncountable material (''den træ'' "the tree", ''det træ'', "the wood"). This is sometime observed in Standard Danish as well (usually ''det mælk'' although strictly grammatically it should be ''den mælk'' "that milk"). While the majority of Danish nouns (ca. 75%) have the ''common'' gender, and ''neuter'' is often used for inanimate objects, the genders of nouns are not generally predictable and must in most cases be memorized. A distinctive feature of the Scandinavian languages, including Danish, is an enclitic definite article.
To demonstrate: The ''common'' gender word "a man" (indefinite) is ''en mand'' but "the man" (definite) is ''manden''. The ''neuter'' equivalent would be "a house" (indefinite) ''et hus'', "the house" (definite) ''huset''. Even though the definite and indefinite articles have separate origins, they have become homographs in Danish. In the plural s the definite article is ''-(e)(r)ne'', and the indefinite article is ''-e(r)''. The enclitic article is not used when an adjective is added to the noun; here the demonstrative pronoun is used instead: ''den store mand'' "the big man", "the big house", ''det store hus''.
Like most Germanic languages, Danish joins compound nouns. The example ''kvindehåndboldlandsholdet'', "the female handball national team", illustrates that it does so to a significantly higher degree than
English. In some cases, nouns are joined with an extra ''s'', like ''landsmand'' (from ''land'', "country", and ''mand'', "man", meaning "compatriot"), but ''landmand'' (from same roots, meaning "farmer"). Some words are joined with an extra ''e'', like ''gæstebog'' (from ''gæst'' and ''bog'', meaning "guest book").
Vocabulary
Danish words are largely derived from the
Old Norse language, with new words formed by compounding. A large percentage of Danish words, however, hail from
Middle Low German (for example, betale = to pay, måske = maybe). Later on,
standard German and
French and now
English have superseded Low German influence - although many old Nordic words remain, they fall out of favor when the new come in, such as can be seen with ''æde'' (to eat) which became less common when the German ''spise'' came into fashion. Because English and Danish are related languages, many common words are very similar in the two languages. For example, the following Danish words are easily recognizable in their written form to English speakers: ''have'', ''over'', ''under'', ''for'', ''give'', ''flag,'' ''salt,'' ''kat''. When pronounced, these words sound quite different from their English equivalents, due to the
Great Vowel Shift of English. In addition, the word ''by'', meaning "village" or "town", occurs in several English placenames, such as ''Whitby'' and ''Selby'', as remnants of the
Viking occupation.
Numerals
In Danish numerals, the tens and units digits of numbers above 20 are reversed when spoken or written, such that 21 is rendered ''enogtyve'', i.e. one and twenty. This is similar to
German,
Dutch (and
Afrikaans) and also to some variants of
Bokmål Norwegian (which is itself heavily influenced by Danish).
The numeral ''halvanden'' means 1.5 (literally "half second"). The numerals ''halvtredje'' (2.5) and ''halvfjerde'' (3.5), likewise constructed by "overcounting", are obsolete, but still implicitly used in the vigesimal system described below. Similarly, the time ''halv tre'', literally "half three", is half past two.
Danish numerals from 50 to 90 are (like the
French numerals 70, 80 and 90) based on a
vigesimal system, not shared with the other Scandinavian languages. This means that the
score is used as a base number: ''Tres'' (short for ''tre-sinds-tyve'') means 3 times 20, that is 60. Similarly, ''halvtreds'' (short for ''halvtredje-sinds-tyve'') means 2.5 times 20, that is 50. The ending ''sindstyve'' is archaic in
cardinal numbers, but still used in
ordinal numbers. Thus, "fifty-two" is usually rendered ''to-og-halvtreds'', whereas "fifty-second" is ''to-og-halvtredsindstyvende''.
For large numbers (one billion or larger), Danish uses the
long scale, so that e.g. one billion is called ''milliard'', and one trillion is called ''billion''.
Writing system
The oldest preserved examples of written Danish (from the Iron and Viking Ages) are in the
Runic alphabet. The introduction of
Christianity also brought the
Latin alphabet to Denmark, and at the end of the
High Middle Ages the Runes had more or less been replaced by the Latin letters.
As in
Germany, the
Fraktur types were still commonly used in the late 19th century (until 1875, Danish children were taught to read and write the Fraktur letters in school), and most books were printed with Fraktur typesetting even in the beginning of the 20th century.
The modern Danish alphabet is similar to the English one, with three additional letters: ''
æ'', ''
ø'', and ''
å'', which come at the end of the
alphabet, in that order. A
spelling reform in 1948 introduced the letter ''å'', already in use in Norwegian and Swedish, into the Danish alphabet to replace the letter ''aa''; the old usage still occurs in some personal and geographical names and old documents (for example, the name of the city of ''Ålborg'' is often spelled ''Aalborg''). When representing the ''å'' sound, ''aa'' is treated just like ''å'' in alphabetical sorting, even though it looks like two letters. When the letters are not available (e.g., in URLs), they are replaced by ''ae'', ''oe'' or ''o'', and ''aa'', respectively.
The same spelling reform changed the spelling of a few common words, such as the past tense ''vilde'' (would), ''kunde'' (could) and ''skulde'' (should), to their current forms of ''ville'', ''kunne'' and ''skulle'' (making them identical to the infinitives in writing, as they are in speech), and did away with the practice of capitalising all nouns, which
German still does. Modern Danish and Norwegian use the same alphabet, though spelling differs somewhat.
See also
★
Jutlandic
★
South Jutlandic
★
Differences between Norwegian Bokmål and Standard Danish
Notes
1. Konvention mellan Sverige, Danmark, Finland, Island och Norge om nordiska medborgares rätt att använda sitt eget språk i annat nordiskt land, ''Nordic Council website''. Retrieved on April 25, 2007.
2. 20th anniversary of the Nordic Language Convention, ''Nordic news'', February 22, 2007. Retrieved on April 25, 2007.
References
★
Basbøll, Hans (2005) ''The Phonology of Danish'' ISBN 0-19-824268-9
External links
★
Danish course with instant audio
★
Danish News Website with Daily Video
★
Collection of Danish bilingual dictionaries
★
Dictionary of the Danish Language
★
"STELLA Danish" free online course for beginners
★
Danish grammar
★
Hear and learn useful expressions in Danish
★
List of online Danish-language related resources
★
Danish and Swedish with sound files including Japanese translation
★
Danish dialect audio samples (in Danish)
العربية
中国
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिन्दी
Italiano
日本語
Português
Русский
Español
