Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken by about six million people, principally in and around Denmark. Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and the northern German region of Southern Schleswig, where it has minority language status. Minor Danish-speaking communities are also found in Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina.
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 and Norwegian Nynorsk are classified as West Norse along with Faroese and Icelandic. However, the "mainland Scandinavian" languages — modern spoken Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish — are largely mutually 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 either varies between regions and speakers.
Until the 16th century, Danish was a continuum of dialects spoken from Southern Jutland and Schleswig to Scania with no standard variety or spelling conventions. With the Protestant Reformation and the introduction of the printing press, a standard language was developed which was based on the dialect of Copenhagen. 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 consisting of 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 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", and some evidence shows that children are slower to acquire the phonological distinctions of Danish compared with other languages. The grammar is moderately inflective with strong and weak conjugations and inflections. Nouns, adjectives, 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 word order is V2, with the finite verb always occupying the second slot in the sentence.
Classification
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 no sharp dividing lines are seen 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: Jutlandic, Insular Danish, and East Danish. 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.
Vocabulary
Approximately 2,000 uncompounded Danish words are derived from Old Norse and ultimately from Proto Indo-European. Of these 2,000, 1,200 are nouns, 500 are verbs and 180 are adjectives. Danish has also absorbed many loanwords, most of which were borrowed from Low German of the Late 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. In the 17th and 18th centuries, standard German and French superseded Low German influence, and in the 20th century, English became the main supplier of loanwords, especially after World War II. Although many old Nordic words remain, some were replaced with borrowed synonyms, for example æde 'eat' was mostly supplanted by the Low German spise. 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%.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 as have, over, under, for, give, flag, salt, and arm are easily recognizable to English speakers.
Mutual intelligibility
Danish is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Swedish. 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.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. 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.
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.
History
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, Early Middle Danish and Late Middle Danish.Runic Danish
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 Dǫnsk tunga 'Danish tongue', or Norrœnt mál 'Norse language'. Norse was written in the runic alphabet, first with the elder futhark and from the 9th century with the younger futhark.
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 and Old East Norse. 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 from Old West Norse was the change of the diphthong æi 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 diphthong changed into ø, as well, as seen in the word ø '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 for stree from gade, still survive in Yorkshire, the East Midlands and East Anglia, and parts of eastern England colonized 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 knife from kniv, husband from husbond, and egg from 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.
Old and Middle dialects
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, 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. 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.