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. There are also minor Danish-speaking communities in Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina. Due to immigration and language shift in urban areas, around 15–20% of the population of Greenland speak Danish as their home language.
Along with the other North Germanic languages, Danish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples that lived in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. Danish, together with Swedish, derives from the East Norse dialect group, while the Old Norwegian dialects before the influence of Danish and Norwegian Bokmål are classified as West Norse along with Faroese and Icelandic. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Danish, Norwegian and Swedish as Mainland Scandinavian while Icelandic and Faroese are classified as Insular Scandinavian.
Until the 16th century, Danish was a continuum of dialects spoken from Schleswig to Scania with no standard variety or spelling conventions. With the Protestant Reformation and the introduction of printing, a standard language was developed which was based on the educated Copenhagen dialect. It spread through use in the education system and administration though German and Latin continued to be the most important written languages well into the 17th century. Following the loss of territory to Germany and Sweden, a nationalist movement adopted the language as a token of Danish identity, and the language experienced a strong surge in use and popularity with major works of literature produced in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, traditional Danish dialects have all but disappeared, though there are regional variants of the standard language. The main differences in language are between generations, with youth language being particularly innovative.
Danish has a very large vowel inventory comprising 27 phonemically distinctive vowels, 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 neighbouring languages, particularly the vowels, difficult prosody and “weakly” pronounced consonants, it is sometimes considered to be a difficult language to learn and understand, and there is some evidence 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. As in English, Danish only has remnants of a former case system, particularly in the pronouns, and it has lost all person marking on verbs. Its syntax is V2, with the finite verb always occupying the second slot in the sentence.
Danish is a Germanic language of the North Germanic branch, other names for this group are the Nordic or Scandinavian languages. Along with Swedish, Danish descends from the Eastern dialects of the Old Norse language; Danish and Swedish are also classified as East Scandinavian or East Nordic languages. Scandinavian languages are often considered a dialect continuum, where there are no sharp dividing lines between the different vernacular languages. 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.
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, and Scanian can be considered a Swedified East Danish dialect, and Bornholmsk is its closest relative.
Danish is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Swedish. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can often understand the others fairly well, though studies have shown that speakers of Norwegian generally understand both Danish and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand each other. Both Swedes and Danes also understand Norwegian better than they understand each other’s languages.
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; nearly all of the native Greenlandic population speak Danish as a second language since its introduction into the education system as a compulsory language in 1928. Danish was an official language in Iceland until 1944 but is today still widely used and is a mandatory subject in school.
In addition, there is a noticeable community of Danish speakers in Southern Schleswig, the portion of Germany bordering Denmark, where it is an officially recognized regional language, just as German is north of the border. Furthermore, Danish is one of the official languages of the European Union and one of the working languages of the Nordic Council. 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.
The more widespread of the two varieties of Norwegian, Bokmål, is very close to Danish, because standard Danish was used as the de facto administrative language until 1814. Bokmål is based on Danish unlike the other variety of Norwegian, Nynorsk, which is based on the Norwegian dialects, with Old Norwegian as an important reference point.
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.
