Danish Language

Danish language, Danish Dansk, the official language of Denmark, spoken there by more than five million people. It is also spoken in a few communities south of the German border; it is taught in the schools of the Faroe Islands, of Iceland, and of Greenland. Danish belongs to the East Scandinavian branch of North Germanic languages. It began to separate from the other Scandinavian languages, to which it is closely related, about ad 1000. The oldest Danish records are runic inscriptions (c. ad 250–800) found from Jutland to southern Sweden; the earliest manuscripts in Danish date from the 13th century.

The norms of the first printed books in Danish continued the norm of the royal chancery in Copenhagen, which was not based on any particular dialect and probably reflected a state of the language closer to that of 1350 than of 1550. Because of the influence of the written language, many speech forms used even by the aristocracy at that time were eliminated or branded as vulgar.

Danish is clearly the Scandinavian language that has undergone the greatest amount of change away from Old Scandinavian. During the Middle Ages it lost the old case system, merged the masculine and feminine genders into one common gender, and acquired many Low German words, prefixes, and suffixes from contact with the traders of the Hanseatic League. In the 18th century a mildly puristic reform led to the replacement of many French loans by their native equivalents (e.g., imagination was replaced by indbildning; compare German Einbildung), and, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Danish became the vehicle of a classical literature. Modern Danish has only two cases (nominative and genitive) and two genders (common and neuter). The most outstanding feature of its sound system is the glottal stop (stød), derived from what was originally a tonal accent. A spelling reform in 1948 eliminated the capitalization of nouns and introduced the letter å for aa, thereby making the spelling more similar to that of Norwegian and Swedish.

Evidence of Denmark’s political power and influence can be seen in the stamp of the Danish language on the Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic languages.