page_title: Danish language
section_title: Dialects
hierarchical_section_title: Danish language / Dialects
caption_attribution_description: A map of Danish dialects.
context_page_description: Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by about six million people, principally in Denmark, Greenland and in the region of Southern Schleswig in northern Germany, where it has minority language status. Also, minor Danish-speaking communities are found in Norway, Sweden, Spain, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina. Due to immigration and language shift in urban areas, about 15–20% of the population of Greenland speak Danish as their first language.
  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 Scandinavian", while Icelandic and Faroese are classified as "insular Scandinavian".
context_section_description: 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.
  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.
  Danish traditional dialects are divided into three main dialect areas:
  Insular Danish (ømål), including dialects of the Danish islands of Zealand, Funen, Lolland, Falster, and Møn
  Jutlandic (jysk), further divided in North, East, West, and South Jutlandic
  Bornholmian (bornholmsk), the dialect of the island of Bornholm
  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" 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. 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. 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.
  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. 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. 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.
caption: Map of Danish dialects
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