Danish

## Overview

**Danish** is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in Denmark and in the region of Southern Schleswig in northern Germany, where it has minority language status. 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, around 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 peopleswho 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 Faroeseand Icelandic. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish as "mainland Scandinavian", while Icelandic and Faroese are classified as "insular Scandinavian".

Until the 16th century, Danish was a continuum of dialects spoken from Schleswig to Scania with no standard variety or spelling conventions. With the Protestant Reformation and the introduction of printing, a standard language was developed which was based on the educated Copenhagen dialect. It spread through use in the education system and administration, though German and Latin continued to be the most important written languages well into the 17th century. Following the loss of territory to Germany and Sweden, a nationalist movement adopted the language as a token of Danish identity, and the language experienced a strong surge in use and popularity, with major works of literature produced in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, traditional Danish dialects have all but disappeared, though 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 comprising 27 phonemically distinctive vowels, and its prosody is characterized by the distinctive phenomenon *stød*, a kind of laryngeal phonation type. Due to the many pronunciation differences that set apart Danish from its neighboring languages, particularly the vowels, difficult prosody and "weakly" pronounced consonants, it is sometimes considered to be a difficult language to learn and understand, and some evidence shows that small children are slower to acquire the phonological distinctions of Danish. 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 syntax is V2 word order, with the finite verb always occupying the second slot in the sentence.

## History

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.

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. 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.

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 Englandcolonized by Danish Vikings. The city of York was once the Viking settlement of Jorvik. Several other English words derive from Old East Norse, for example "are" (*er*), "knife" (*kniv*), "husband" (*husbond*), and "egg" (*æg*). 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.

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.

Throughout this period, Danish was in contact with Low German, and many Low German loan words were introduced in this period. 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/.

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

Following the first Bible translation, the development of Danish as a written language, as a language of religion, administration, and public discourse accelerated.

## Danish excerpt from Wikipedia article "Skandinavien"

Langt størstedelen af ​​befolkningerne i Skandinavien er skandinaver. De nedstammer fra flere (nord)germanske stammer, der oprindeligt beboede den sydlige del af Skandinavien og det nordlige Tyskland. De germanske stammer talte et germansk sprog, der udviklede sig til oldnordisk. Disse folk blev kendt som nordboere i den tidlige middelalder. Vikingerne er populært forbundet med nordisk kultur. Islændinge og færinger nedstammer især, men ikke udelukkende, fra folk kendt som skandinaver. Mange af de oprindelige skandinaver, der bosatte sig i fastlandet Finland er blevet blandet med det finske folk under århundreder, men Finland er stadig officielt tosproget. Finlands største befolkningsgruppe er finner, hvis modersmål er enten finsk (omkring 95 %), svensk eller begge dele. Det svensktalende mindretal bor hovedsagelig på kysten fra byen Porvoo i Den Finske Bugt, til byen Kokkola, op i den Botniske Bugt. Ålandsøerne, en autonom provins i Finland, der ligger i Østersøen mellem Finland og Sverige, er helt svensktalende. Det ekstreme nordlige Norge, Sverige og Finland, samt den mest nordvestlige del af Rusland, er hjemsted for regionens oprindelige indbyggere, dagens mindretal af samiske folk. Samerne boede oprindeligt i langt større områder i Skandinavien og Finland. I nyere historie er mennesker af mange forskellige oprindelser flyttet til Skandinavien og har dannet store minoriteter, den største, er dog finnerne af Sverige. I slutningen af ​​tidlige middelalder blev talrige germanske småriger og høvdigedømmer forenet i de tre riger Danmark, Norge og Sverige. Landene tog kristendommen til sig. Den erstattede den nordiske mytologi. Finland, samt dele af Estland, har med jævne mellemrum været under skandinavisk herredømme i længere tid ad gangen. Skandinavien har, på trods af mange krige i løbet af årene siden dannelsen af ​​de tre riger, været politisk og kulturelt tætte, selvom de konstellationer og alliancer, der har været, er skiftet gennem århundreder. Igennem hele 1400-tallet blev Skandinavien forenet i Kalmarunionen. Nationerne samarbejder i dag primært i Den Europæiske Union eller i det Nordisk Råd.