The first page of the Jutlandic Law originally from 1241 inCodex Holmiensis, copied in 1350. The first sentence is: "Mæth logh skal land byggas" Modern orthography: "Med lov skal land bygges" English translation: 'With law shall a country be built'
Along with the other North Germanic languages, Danish is a descendant ofOld Norse, the common language of theGermanic peoples who lived inScandinavia during theViking Era. Danish, together with Swedish, derives from theEast Norsedialect group, while theMiddle Norwegian language (before the influence of Danish) andNorwegian Nynorsk are classified asWest Norse along withFaroese andIcelandic (Norwegian Bokmål may be thought of as mixed Danish-Norwegian, therefore mixed East-West Norse). However, the "mainland (or continental) Scandinavian" languages — modern spoken Danish,Norwegian, andSwedish — are largelymutually intelligible with each other, but not with "insular Scandinavian", i.e. Icelandic and Faroese. Although the written languages are compatible, spoken Danish is distinctly different from Norwegian and Swedish and thus the degree of mutual intelligibility with eithervaries between regions and speakers.
Until the 16th century, Danish was a continuum of dialects spoken fromSouthern Jutland andSchleswig toScania with nostandard variety or spelling conventions. With the ProtestantReformation and theintroduction of the printing press, a standard language was developed which was based on the dialect ofCopenhagen. 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, traditionalDanish 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 consisting of 27phonemically distinctivevowels,[9] and itsprosody is characterized by the distinctive phenomenonstød, a kind oflaryngeal phonation type. Due to the many pronunciation differences that set Danish apart from its neighboring languages, particularly the vowels, difficult prosody and "weakly" pronounced consonants, it is sometimes considered to be a "difficult language to learn, acquire and understand",[10][11] and some evidence shows that children are slower to acquire the phonological distinctions of Danish compared with other languages.[12] The grammar is moderatelyinflective with strong (irregular) and weak (regular) conjugations and inflections. Nouns, adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns distinguish common and neutral gender. Like English, Danish only has remnants of a formercase system, particularly in the pronouns. Unlike English, it has lost all person marking on verbs. Its word order isV2, with the finite verb always occupying the second slot in the sentence.
Danish is aGermanic language of theNorth Germanic branch. Other names for this group are the Nordic[13] or Scandinavian languages. Along with Swedish, Danish descends from the Eastern dialects of theOld Norse language; Danish and Swedish are also classified as East Scandinavian or East Nordic languages.[14][15] Scandinavian languages are often considered adialect continuum, where no sharp dividing lines are seen between the different vernacular languages.[14]
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.[14]
Danish itself can be divided into three main dialect areas:Jutlandic (West Danish),Insular Danish (including the standard variety), andEast Danish (includingBornholmian andScanian). According to the view that Scandinavian is a dialect continuum, East Danish can be considered intermediary between Danish and Swedish, while Scanian can be considered a Swedified East Danish dialect, and Bornholmian is its closest relative.[14]
Danish label readingmilitærpoliti 'military police', on a police vehicle
Approximately 2,000 uncompounded Danish words are derived fromOld Norse and ultimately fromProto Indo-European. Of these 2,000, 1,200 are nouns, 500 are verbs and 180 are adjectives.[16] Danish has also absorbed manyloanwords, most of which were borrowed fromLow German of theLate Middle Ages. Out of the 500 most frequently used Danish words, 100 are loans from Middle Low German; this is because Low German was the second official language of Denmark–Norway.[17] In the 17th and 18th centuries,standard German andFrench superseded Low German influence, and in the 20th century, English became the main supplier of loanwords, especially afterWorld War II. Although many old Nordic words remain, some were replaced with borrowed synonyms, for exampleæde 'eat' was mostly supplanted by the Low Germanspise. As well as loanwords, new words can be freely formed by compounding existing words. In standard texts of contemporary Danish, Middle Low German loans account for about 16–17% of the vocabulary, Graeco-Latin loans 4–8%, French 2–4% and English about 1%.[17]
The shared Germanic heritage of Danish and English is demonstrated with many common words that are very similar in the two languages. For example, when written, commonly used Danish verbs, nouns, and prepositions such ashave,over,under,for,give,flag,salt, andarm are easily recognizable to English speakers.[18]
Danish is largelymutually intelligible withNorwegian andSwedish. A proficient speaker of any of the three languages can often understand the others fairly well, though studies have shown that the mutual intelligibility is asymmetric: Norwegian speakers generally understand both Danish and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand each other. Concomitantly, Swedes and Danes understand Norwegian better than they understand each other's languages.[19]
Norwegian occupies the middle position in terms of intelligibility because of its shared border with Sweden, resulting in a similarity in pronunciation, combined with the long tradition of having Danish as a written language, which has led to similarities in vocabulary.[20] Among younger Danes, Copenhageners are worse at understanding Swedish than Danes from the provinces. In general, younger Danes are not as good at understanding the neighboring languages as the young in Norway and Sweden.[19]
Danish is sometimes grouped with Norwegian and Swedish together as "mainland Scandinavian" languages. This contrasts with the "insular Scandinavian" languages Icelandic and Faroese. The Mainland Scandinavian languages has undergone some of the same changes in terms of vocabulary and inflection because of shared geographical proximity and history.[21]
The Danish philologist Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen divided the history of Danish into a period from 800 AD to 1525 of Old Danish, which he subdivided into Runic Danish (800–1100), Early Middle Danish (1100–1350) and Late Middle Danish (1350–1525).[22]
OtherGermanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility
Móðir Dyggva var Drótt, dóttir Danps konungs, sonar Rígs er fyrstr var konungr kallaðr á danska tungu. 'Dyggvi's mother was Drott, the daughter of king Danp,Ríg's son, who was the first to be called king in the Danish tongue.'
By the eighth century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia,Proto-Norse, had undergone some changes and evolved intoOld Norse.This language was generally calledDǫnsk tunga 'Danish tongue', orNorrœnt mál 'Norse language'. Norse was written in therunic alphabet, first with theelder futhark and from the 9th century with theyounger futhark.[24]
Possibly as far back as 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 andIceland) and Old East Norse (Denmark andSweden). 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.[25] A change that separated Old East Norse (Runic Swedish/Danish) from Old West Norse was the change of thediphthongæi (Old West Norseei) to themonophthonge, as instæin tosten. This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older readstain and the laterstin. Also, a change ofau as indauðr intoø as indøðr occurred. This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change fromtauþr intotuþr. Moreover, theøy (Old West Norseey) diphthong changed intoø, as well, as seen in the wordø 'island'. This monophthongization started in Jutland and spread eastward, having spread throughout Denmark and most of Sweden by 1100.[26]
Through Danish conquest, Old East Norse was once widely spoken in thenortheast counties of England. Many words derived from Norse, such asgate for stree fromgade, still survive inYorkshire, the East Midlands and East Anglia, andparts of eastern England colonized by DanishVikings. The city ofYork was once the Viking settlement of Jorvik. Several other English words derive from Old East Norse, for exampleknife fromkniv,husband fromhusbond, andegg fromæg. The suffix-by for 'town' is common in place names in Yorkshire and the east Midlands, for example Selby, Whitby, Derby, and Grimsby. The worddale meaning valley is common in Yorkshire and Derbyshire placenames.[27]
Fangær man saar i hor seng mæth annæns mansz kunæ. oc kumær han burt liuænd.... 'If one catches someone in the whore-bed with another man's wife and he comes away alive...'
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. TheJutlandic Law andScanian 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.[29]
Throughout this period, Danish was in contact withLow German, and many Low German loan words were introduced in this period.[30] With theProtestant 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 thestød, the voicing of many stop consonants, and the weakening of many final vowels to /e/.[31]
The first printed book in Danish dates from 1495, theRimkrøniken (Rhyming Chronicle), a history book told in rhymed verses.[32] The first complete translation of theBible in Danish, the Bible of Christian II translated byChristiern Pedersen, was published in 1550. Pedersen's orthographic choices set thede facto standard for subsequent writing in Danish.[33] From around 1500, several printing presses were in operation in Denmark publishing in Danish and other languages. In the period after 1550, presses in Copenhagen dominated the publication of material in the Danish language.[34]
Following the first Bible translation, the development of Danish as awritten language, as a language of religion, administration, and public discourse accelerated. In the second half of the 17th century, grammarians elaborated grammars of Danish, first among themRasmus Bartholin's 1657 Latin grammarDe studio lingvæ danicæ; thenLaurids Olufsen Kock's 1660 grammar of theZealand dialectIntroductio ad lingvam Danicam puta selandicam; and in 1685 the first Danish grammar written in Danish,Den Danske Sprog-Kunst ('The Art of the Danish Language') byPeder Syv. Major authors from this period areThomas Kingo, poet and psalmist, andLeonora Christina Ulfeldt, whose novelJammersminde (Remembered Woes) is considered a literary masterpiece by scholars.Orthography was still not standardized and the principles for doing so were vigorously discussed among Danish philologists. The grammar ofJens Pedersen Høysgaard was the first to give a detailed analysis of Danish phonology and prosody, including a description of thestød. In this period, scholars were also discussing whether it was best to "write as one speaks" or to "speak as one writes", including whether archaic grammatical forms that had fallen out of use in the vernacular, such as the plural form of verbs, should be conserved in writing, i.e.han er 'he is' vs.de ere 'they are'.[35]
The East Danish provinces were lost to Sweden after theSecond Treaty of Brömsebro (1645) after which they were gradually Swedified; just as Norway was politically severed from Denmark, beginning also a gradual end of Danish influence on Norwegian (influence through the shared written standard language remained). With theintroduction of absolutism in 1660, the Danish state was further integrated, and the language of the Danish chancellery, a Zealandic variety with German and French influence, became thede factoofficial standard language, especially in writing — this was the original so-calledrigsdansk 'Danish of the Realm'. Also, beginning in the mid-18th century, theskarre-R, theuvular R sound ([ʁ]), began spreading through Denmark, likely through influence fromParisian French and German. It affected all of the areas where Danish had been influential, including all of Denmark, Southern Sweden, and coastal southern Norway.[36]
In the 18th century, Danish philology was advanced byRasmus Rask, who pioneered the disciplines ofcomparative andhistorical linguistics, and wrote the first English-language grammar of Danish. Literary Danish continued to develop with the works ofLudvig Holberg, whose plays and historical and scientific works laid the foundation for the Danish literary canon. With the Danish colonization of Greenland byHans Egede, Danish became the administrative and religious language there, while Iceland and the Faroe Islands had the status of Danish colonies with Danish as an official language until the mid-20th century.[35]
Moders navn er vort Hjertesprog, kun løs er al fremmed Tale. Det alene i mund og bog, kan vække et folk af dvale. 'Mother's name is our hearts' tongue, only idle is all foreign speech It alone, in mouth or in book, can rouse a people from sleep.'
Throughout the 19th century, Danes emigrated, establishing small expatriate communities in the Americas, particularly in the United States, Canada, and Argentina, where memory and some use of Danish remains today.[8]
Following the loss of Schleswig to Germany, the Danish language in the region lost status.[38] After theSchleswig referendum in 1920, a number of Danes remained as aminority within German territories.[39] After the occupation of Denmark by Germany in World War II, the 1948 orthography reform dropped the German-influenced rule of capitalizing nouns, and introduced the letter⟨å⟩.[40]
With the exclusive use ofrigsdansk, the High Copenhagen Standard, in national broadcasting, the traditional dialects came under increased pressure. In the 20th century, they have all but disappeared, and the standard language has extended throughout the country.[41] Minor regional pronunciation variation of the standard language, sometimes calledregionssprog 'regional languages' remain, and are in some cases vital. Today, the major varieties of Standard Danish are High Copenhagen Standard, associated with elderly, well to-do, and well educated people of the capital, and low Copenhagen speech traditionally associated with the working class, but today adopted as the prestige variety of the younger generations.[42][43] Also, in the 21st century, the influence of immigration has had linguistic consequences, such as the emergence of a so-calledmultiethnolect in the urban areas, an immigrant Danish variety (also known asPerkerdansk), combining elements of different immigrant languages such as Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish, as well as English and Danish.[42]
Within theDanish Realm, Danish is the national language of Denmark and one of two official languages of the Faroe Islands (alongsideFaroese). There is a Faroese variant of Danish known asGøtudanskt. Until 2009, Danish was also one of two official languages of Greenland (alongsideGreenlandic). Danish now acts as alingua franca in Greenland, with a large percentage of native Greenlanders able to speak Danish as a second language (it was introduced into the education system as a compulsory language in 1928). About 10% ofthe population speaks Danish as theirfirst language, due to immigration.[5]
Iceland was a territory ruled byDenmark–Norway, one of whose official languages was Danish.[44] Though Danish ceased to be an official language in Iceland in 1944, it is still widely used and is a mandatory subject in school, taught as a second foreign language from 7th grade after English.[45]
No law stipulates an official language for Denmark, making Danish thede facto official language only. The Code of Civil Procedure does, however, lay down Danish as the language of the courts.[46] Since 1997, public authorities have been obliged to follow the official spelling system laid out in the Orthography Law. In the 21st century, discussions have been held with a view to create a law that would make Danish the official language of Denmark.[47]
In addition, a noticeable community of Danish speakers is inSouthern Schleswig, the portion of Germany bordering Denmark, and a variant of Standard Danish,Southern Schleswig Danish, is spoken in the area. Since 2015,Schleswig-Holstein has officially recognized Danish as aregional language,[6][7] just asGerman is north of the border. Furthermore, Danish is one of the official languages of theEuropean Union and one of the working languages of theNordic Council.[48] Under theNordic 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 anyinterpretation ortranslation costs.[48]
The more widespread of the two varieties of writtenNorwegian,Bokmål, is very close to Danish, because standard Danish was used as thede facto administrative language until 1814 and one of the official languages ofDenmark–Norway.Bokmål is based on Danish (specificallyDano-Norwegian), unlike the other variety of Norwegian,Nynorsk, which is based on the Norwegian dialects, withOld Norwegian as an important reference point.[14]
There are also Danish emigrant communities in other places of the world who still use the language in some form. In the Americas, Danish-speaking communities can be found in theUS,Canada,Argentina andBrazil.[8]
Map of Danish dialectsA map showing the distribution of stød in Danish dialects: Dialects in the pink areas havestød, as in standard Danish, while those in the green ones have tones, as in Swedish and Norwegian. Dialects in the blue areas have (like Icelandic, German, and English) neitherstød nor tones.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,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.[41][14]
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.[49][41]
Danish traditional dialects are divided into three main dialect areas:
Jutlandic is further divided intoSouthern 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 additional internal variation. Bornholmian is the only Eastern Danish dialect spoken in Denmark. Since the Swedish conquest of the Eastern Danish provincesSkåne,Halland andBlekinge in 1645/1658, the Eastern Danish dialects there have come under heavy Swedish influence. Many residents now speak regional variants ofStandard Swedish. However, many researchers still consider the dialects in Scania, Halland (hallandsk) and Blekinge (blekingsk) as part of the East Danish dialect group.[53][54][55] The Swedish National Encyclopedia from 1995 classifies Scanian asan Eastern Danish dialect with South Swedish elements.[56]
Traditional dialects differ in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary from standard Danish. Phonologically, one of the most diagnostic differences is the presence or absence ofstød.[57] Four main regional variants for the realization of stød are known: In Southeastern Jutlandic, Southernmost Funen, Southern Langeland, and Ærø, nostød is used, but instead apitch accent (like inNorwegian,Swedish andGutnish). South of a line (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 neitherstød nor pitch accent exists.[58] Most of Jutland and on Zealand usestød, and in Zealandic traditional dialects and regional language,stød occurs more often than in the standard language. In Zealand, thestød line divides Southern Zealand (withoutstød), 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.[59][60]
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 ofsuffixes, while Western Jutlandic has only one gender and the definite form of nouns uses an article before the noun itself, in the same fashion asWest Germanic languages. The Bornholmian dialect has maintained to this day many archaic features, such as a distinction between threegrammatical genders.[52] 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.[61] 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, literallyThe cat, he is having kittens, because cat is a masculine noun, thus is referred to ashan 'he', even if it is a female cat.[62]
The sound system of Danish is unusual, particularly in its large vowel inventory. In informal or rapid speech, the language is prone to considerable reduction of unstressed syllables, creating many vowel-less syllables with syllabic consonants, as well as reduction of final consonants. Furthermore, the language's prosody does not include many clues about the sentence structure, unlike many other languages, making it relatively more difficult to perceive the different sounds of the speech flow.[10][11] These factors taken together make Danish pronunciation difficult to master for learners, and research shows Danish children take slightly longer in learning to segment speech in early childhood.[12]
Although somewhat depending on analysis, most modern variants of Danish distinguish 12 long vowels, 13 short vowels, and two central vowels,/ə/ and/ɐ/, which only occur in unstressed syllables. This gives a total of 27 different vowel phonemes – a very large number among the world's languages.[63] At least 19 different diphthongs also occur, all with a short first vowel and the second segment being either[j],[w], or[ɐ̯].[64] The table below shows the approximate distribution of the vowels as given byGrønnum (1998a) in Modern Standard Danish, with the symbols used inIPA/Danish. Questions of analysis may give a slightly different inventory, for example based on whether r-colored vowels are considered distinct phonemes.Basbøll (2005:50) gives 25 "full vowels", not counting the two unstressed "schwa" vowels.
Many of these phonemes have quite differentallophones inonset andcoda where intervocalic consonants followed by a full vowel are treated as in onset, otherwise as in coda.[66] Phonetically there is no voicing distinction among the stops, rather the distinction is one ofaspiration.[64]/ptk/ are aspirated in onset realized as[pʰ,tsʰ,kʰ], but not in coda. The pronunciation oft,[tsʰ], is in between a simple aspirated[tʰ] and a fully affricated[tsʰ] (as has happened in German with the secondHigh German consonant shift fromt toz). There is dialectal variation, and someJutlandic dialects may be less affricated than other varieties, with Northern and Western Jutlandic traditional dialects having an almost unaspirateddry t.[67]
/v/ is pronounced as a[w] in syllable coda, so e.g./ɡraːvə/ (grave) is pronounced[kʁɑːwə].[68] Otherwise/v/ is realized as[ʋ].[69]
[ʋ,ð] often have slight frication, but are usually pronounced asapproximants. Danish[ð] differs from the English sound that is conventionally transcribed with the same IPA symbol, in that it is not a dental fricative but an alveolarapproximant which is frequently heard as[l] by second language learners.[64]
The sound[ɕ] is found for example in the word /sjovˀ/ 'fun' pronounced[ɕɒwˀ] and/tjalˀ/ 'marijuana' pronounced[tɕælˀ]. Some analyses have posited it as a phoneme, but since it occurs only after/s/ or/t/ and[j] does not occur after these phonemes, it can be analyzed as anallophone of/j/, which is devoiced after voiceless alveolar frication. This makes it unnecessary to postulate a/ɕ/-phoneme in Danish.[70]
A pitch trace of the sentenceHåndboldspil er meget belastende 'Handball playing is very demanding'.
Danish is characterized by aprosodic feature calledstød (lit.'thrust'). This is a form of laryngealization orcreaky voice. Some sources have described it as aglottal stop, but this is a very infrequent realization, and today phoneticians consider it a phonation type or a prosodic phenomenon.[72] The occurrence is also dependent on stress, and some varieties also realize it primarily as a tone.[73] Thestød has phonemic status, since it serves as the sole distinguishing feature of words with different meanings inminimal pairs such asbønder 'peasants' withstød, versusbønner 'beans' withoutstød. The distribution ofstød in the vocabulary is related to the distribution of the common Scandinavianpitch accents found in most dialects ofNorwegian andSwedish.[74]
Stress is phonemic and distinguishes words such asbilligst/ˈbilisd/ 'cheapest' andbilist/biˈlisd/ 'car driver'.[75]
Intonation reflects the stress group, sentence type and prosodic phrase. In Copenhagen Standard Danish, the pitch pattern reaches its lowest peak within the stress group on the stressed syllable followed by its highest peak on the following unstressed syllable, after which it declines gradually until the next stress group.[76]Ininteraction, pitch can mark e.g. the end of a story[77] and turn-taking.[78]
Similarly to the case of English, modern Danish grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-Europeandependent-marking pattern with a richinflectional morphology and relatively free word order, to a mostlyanalytic pattern with little inflection, a fairly fixedSVO word order and a complex syntax. Some traits typical of Germanic languages persist in Danish, such as the distinction between irregularly inflectedstrong stems inflected throughablaut orumlaut (i.e. changing the vowel of the stem, as in the pairstager/tog 'takes/took' andfod/fødder 'foot/feet' and weak stems inflected through affixation, such aselsker/elskede 'love/loved' andbil/biler 'car/cars'. Vestiges of the Germanic case and gender system are found in the pronoun system. Typical for an Indo-European language, Danish followsaccusativemorphosyntactic alignment. Danish distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, numerals, adjectives, adverbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections andonomatopoeia.[79]
Nouns are inflected for number (singular vs. plural) and definiteness, and are classified into two grammatical genders. Only pronouns inflect for case, and the previous genitive case has become anenclitic. A distinctive feature of the Nordic languages, including Danish, is that the definite articles, which also mark noun gender, have developed into suffixes. Typical of Germanic languages plurals are either irregular or "strong" stems inflected throughumlaut, i.e. changing the vowel of the stem (e.g.fod/fødder 'foot/feet',mand/mænd 'man/men'), or regular or "weak" stems inflected through affixation (e.g.skib/skibe 'ship/ships',kvinde/kvinder 'woman/women').[80]
Standard Danish has twonominal genders:common andneuter; the common gender arose as the historical feminine and masculine genders conflated into a single category. Some traditional dialects retain a three-way gender distinction, between masculine, feminine and neuter, and some dialects of Jutland have a masculine/feminine contrast. While the majority of Danish nouns (ca. 75%) have thecommon gender, andneuter is often used for inanimate objects, the genders of nouns are not generally predictable and must in most cases be memorized. The gender of a noun determines the form of adjectives that modify it, and the form of the definite suffixes.[81]
Definiteness is marked by two mutually exclusive articles: either a postposed enclitic or a preposed article which is the obligatory way to mark definiteness when nouns are modified by an adjective.[82] Neuter nouns take the clitic-et, and common gender nouns take-en. Indefinite nouns take the articlesen (common gender) oret (neuter). Hence, the common gender nounen mand 'a man' (indefinite) has the definite formmanden 'the man', whereas the neuter nounet hus 'a house' (indefinite) has the definite form, 'the house' (definite)huset.[81][83]
Indefinite:
Jeg
I
så
saw
et
a
hus
house
Jeg sået hus
I sawa house
Definite with enclitic article:
Jeg
I
så
saw
huset
the house
Jeg så {huset}
I saw {the house}
Definite with preposed demonstrative article:
Jeg
I
så
saw
det
the
store
big
hus
house
Jeg sådet store hus
I sawthe big house
The plural definite ending is-(e)ne, e.g.drenge 'boys' >drengene 'the boys' andpiger 'girls' >pigerne 'the girls', and nouns ending in-ere lose the last-e before adding the-ne suffix, e.g.danskere 'Danes' >danskerne 'the Danes'. When the noun is modified by an adjective, the definiteness is marked by the definite article, eitherden for common gender nouns ordet for neuter, and the definite form of the adjective:den store mand 'the big man',det store hus 'the big house'.[84][83]
There are three different types of regular plurals: Class 1 forms the plural with the suffix-er (indefinite) and-erne (definite), Class 2 with the suffix-e (indefinite) and-ene (definite), and Class 3 takes no suffix for the plural indefinite form and-ene for the plural definite.[85]
Most irregular nouns have an ablaut plural (i.e. with a change in the stem vowel), or combine ablaut stem-change with the suffix, and some have unique plural forms. Unique forms may be inherited, e.g. the plural oføje 'eye', which is the old dual formøjne 'eyes', or for loan words they may be borrowed from the donor language, e.g. the wordkonto 'account' which is borrowed from Italian and uses the Italian masculine plural formkonti 'accounts'.[86][87]
Possessive phrases are formed with the enclitic -s, for examplemin fars hus 'my father's house' where the possessive clitic is placed at the end of the nounfar 'father'.[88] This is however not an example ofgenitive case marking, because in the case of longer noun phrases the -s attaches to the last word in the phrase, which need not be the head-noun or even a noun at all:[89][90]
Complex noun phrase:
kongen
the king
af
of
Danmarks
Denmark's
bolsjefabrik
candy factory
(where the factory is owned by the king of Denmark)
kongen af Danmarks bolsjefabrik
{the king} of Denmark's {candy factory}
Relative clause with stranded preposition:
det
that
er
is
pigen
the girl
Uffe
Uffe
bor
lives
sammen
together
meds
with's
datter
daughter
det er {pigen} Uffe bor sammen meds datter
that is {the girl} Uffe lives together with's daughter
'That is the daughter of the girl that Uffe lives with'
Like all Germanic languages, Danish forms compound nouns. These are represented in Danish orthography as one word, as inkvindehåndboldlandsholdet 'the women's national handball team'. In some cases, nouns are joined with-s- as alinking element, likelandsmand 'compatriot' formed fromland 'country', andmand 'man', while others are unmarked, e.g.landmand 'farmer' from the same roots. Some words are joined with-e- instead, likegæstebog 'guest book' fromgæst 'guest' andbog 'book'. The rules for linking elements are complex and there are also irregular linking elements.[91]
As in English, the Danish pronominal system makes a distinction between nominative and oblique case. The nominative form of pronouns is used when pronouns occur as grammatical subject of a sentence (and only when non-coordinated and without a following modifier[92]). The oblique forms are used for all non-subject functions including direct and indirect object, predicative, comparative and other types of constructions. The third person singular pronouns also distinguish between animate masculinehan 'he' and animate femininehun 'she', as well as inanimate neuterdet 'it' and inanimate common genderden 'it'.[93]
Jeg sover: 'I sleep'
Du sover: 'you sleep'
Jeg kysser dig: 'I kiss you'
Du kysser mig: 'you kiss me'
Possessive pronouns have independent and adjectival uses, but the same form.[94] The form is used both adjectivally preceding a possessed noun, e.g.det er min hest 'it is my horse', and independently in place of the possessed noun, e.g.den er min 'it is mine'. In the third person singular,sin is used when the possessor is also the subject of the sentence, whereashans 'his',hendes 'her' ordens/dets 'its' is used when the possessor is different from the grammatical subject.[95][96]
Danish verbs are morphologically simple, marking very few grammatical categories. They do not mark person or number of subject, although the marking of plural subjects was still used in writing as late as the 19th century. Verbs have a past, non-past and infinitive form, past and present participle forms, and a passive, and an imperative.[97]
Verbs can be divided into two main conjugation classes, the strong/irregular verbs and the regular/weak verbs.[82] The regular verbs are also divided into two classes, those that take the past suffix-te and those that take the suffix-ede.[98]
The infinitive always ends in a vowel, usually -e (pronounced[ə]), and is preceded by the infinitive markerat (pronounced[ʌ]) in some syntactic functions.[98] The non-past or present tense takes the suffix-r, except for a few strong verbs that have irregular non-past forms. The past form does not necessarily mark past tense, but also counterfactuality or conditionality, and the non-past has many uses besides present tense time reference.[99]
The present participle ends in-ende, e.g.løbende 'running'. The past participle ends in-(e)t, e.g.løbet 'run', or-t, e.g.købt 'bought'.[100]
Theperfect tense is constructed withhave 'to have' and participial forms, like in English. But some intransitive verbs form usevære 'to be' instead, and some may use both with a difference in meaning.[101]
Hun har gået.Flyet har fløjet:She has walked.The plane has flown
Hun er gået.Flyet er fløjet:She has left.The plane has taken off
Hun havde gået.Flyet havde fløjet:She had walked.The plane had flown
Hun var gået.Flyet var fløjet:She had left.The plane had taken off
The passive form takes the suffix-s:avisen læses hver dag 'the newspaper is read every day'. Another passive construction uses the auxiliary verbblive 'become':avisen bliver læst hver dag.[99][102]
The imperative form is the infinitive without the final schwa-vowel, withstød potentially being applied depending on syllable structure.[103]
Certain numerals are formed on the basis of avigesimal system with various rules. In the word forms of numbers above 20, the units are stated before the tens, so 21 is renderedenogtyve, literally 'one and twenty'.[104]
The numeralhalvanden means1+1⁄2, but is literally 'half second', implying 'one plus half of the second one'). The analogous numeralshalvtredje (2+1⁄2),halvfjerde (3+1⁄2) andhalvfemte (4+1⁄2) are obsolete, but are still implicitly used in the vigesimal system described below.[105] Similarly, thetemporal designationklokken halv tre, literally 'half three (o'clock)', is half past two.[106]
One peculiar feature of the Danish language is that the numerals 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 are based on a vigesimal system (like theFrench numerals from 80 through 99), meaning that thescore (20) is used as a base unit in counting.Tres is short fortre-sinds-tyve 'three times twenty' and means 60, while 50 ishalvtreds, short forhalvtredje-sinds-tyve '2+1⁄2 times twenty', usinghalv- as described above. Theendingsindstyve, meaning 'times twenty' is no longer included incardinal numbers, but may still be used inordinal numbers. Thus, in modern Danish, 52 is usually rendered astooghalvtreds, from the now obsoletetooghalvtredsindstyve, whereas 52nd is eithertooghalvtredsende ortooghalvtredsindstyvende.[105][107]
Twenty istyve, derived from Old Danishtiughu,Old Norse formtuttugu, meaning 'two tens',[108] while thirty istredive, and forty isfyrre, from Old Danishfyritiughu 'four tens'. For forty, thearchaismfyrretyve is sometimes used. Thus, the suffix-tyve should be understood as a plural ofti (10), though the independent wordtyve means 20, making it hard to explain whyfyrretyve is 40 (four tens) and not 80 (four twenties).[105]
For large numbers (one billion or larger), Danish uses thelong scale, so that the short-scale billion (1,000,000,000) is calledmilliard, and the short-scale trillion (1,000,000,000,000) isbillion.[110]
Danish basic constituent order in simple sentences with both a subject and an object isSubject–Verb–Object.[111] However, Danish is also aV2 language, which means that the verb must always be the second constituent of the sentence. Following the Danish grammarianPaul Diderichsen[112] Danish grammar tends to be analyzed as consisting of slots or fields, and in which certain types of sentence material can be moved to the pre-verbal (orfoundation) field to achieve different pragmatic effects. Usually the sentence material occupying the preverbal slot has to be pragmatically marked, usually either new information ortopics. There is no rule that subjects must occur in the preverbal slot, but since subject and topic often coincide, they often do. Therefore, whenever any sentence material that is not the subject occurs in the preverbal position the subject is demoted to postverbal position and the sentence order becomes VSO.[113]
Peter (S) så (V) Jytte (O): 'Peter saw Jytte'
but
I går så (V) Peter (S) Jytte (O): 'Yesterday, Peter saw Jytte'
When there is no pragmatically marked constituents in the sentence to take the preverbal slot (for example when all the information is new), the slot has to take adummy subjectder 'there'.[114]
der kom en pige ind ad døren: there came a girl in through the door, 'A girl came in the door'
Haberland (1994, p. 336) describes the basic order of sentence constituents in main clauses as comprising the following 8 positions:
Og
ham
havde
Per
ikke
skænket
en tanke
i årevis
And
him
had
Per
not
given
a thought
for years
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
'And him Per hadn't given a thought in years'
Position 0 is not part of the sentence and can only contain sentential connectors (such as conjunctions or interjections). Position 1 can contain any sentence constituent. Position 2 can only contain the finite verb. Position 3 is the subject position, unless the subject is fronted to occur in position 1. Position 4 can only contain light adverbs and the negation. Position 5 is for non-finite verbs, such as auxiliaries. Position 6 is the position of direct and indirect objects, and position 7 is for heavy adverbial constituents.[113]
Questions withquestion words (wh-questions or content questions) are formed differently fromyes/no questions. In content questions the question word occupies the preverbal field, regardless of whether its grammatical role is subject or object or adverbial. Inyes/no questions the preverbal field is empty, so that the sentence begins with the verb.[115]
In subordinate clauses, the word order differs from that of main clauses. In the subordinate clause structure the verb is preceded by the subject and any light adverbial material (e.g. negation).[116]Complement clauses begin with the particleat 'that', whilerelative clauses are introduced by the relative pronounssom order 'who, that'.[117]
The oldest preserved examples of written Danish (from the Iron and Viking Ages) are in theRunic alphabet.[118] The introduction ofChristianity also brought theLatin script to Denmark.[119] After the 13th century, runes had essentially been replaced by Latin letters.[120]
Danish orthography isconservative, using most of the conventions established in the 16th century. The spoken language however has changed a lot since then, creating a gap between the spoken and written languages.[121] Since 1955,Dansk Sprognævn has been the official language council in Denmark.[122]
The modern Danish alphabet is similar to the English one, with three additional letters:⟨æ⟩,⟨ø⟩, and⟨å⟩, which come at the end of thealphabet, in that order.[123] The letters⟨c⟩,⟨q⟩,⟨w⟩,⟨x⟩ and⟨z⟩ are only used in loan words. Aspelling reform in 1948 introduced the letter⟨å⟩, already in use in Norwegian and Swedish, into the Danish alphabet to replace thedigraph⟨aa⟩.[118]⟨Aa⟩ is still used in some person andplace names; for example, the name of the cities ofAalborg andAabenraa are spelled with⟨Aa⟩ following decision by the local municipalities.Aarhus decided to go back to⟨Aa⟩ in 2011.[124] When representing the same sound as⟨å⟩,⟨aa⟩ is treated like⟨å⟩ inalphabetical sorting, though it appears to be two letters.[125]
The 1948 spelling reform also changed the spelling of a few common words, such as the past tense verbsvilde 'would',kunde 'could' andskulde 'should', to their current forms ofville,kunne andskulle (making them identical to the infinitives in writing, as they are in speech). Modern Danish and Norwegian use the same alphabet, though spelling differs slightly, particularly with the phonetic spelling of loanwords.[126]
Alle mennesker er født frie og lige i værdighed og rettigheder. De er udstyret med fornuft og samvittighed, og de bør handle mod hverandre i en broderskabets ånd.[127]
Article 1 of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights in English:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.[128]
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