Danish language

Danish (dansk) belongs to the North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages), a sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people mainly in Denmark including some 50,000 people in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, where it holds the status of minority language. Danish also holds official status and is a mandatory subject in school in the former Danish colonies of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, that now enjoy limited autonomy. In Iceland, which was a part of Denmark until 1944, Danish is still the second foreign language taught in schools (although a few learn Swedish or Norwegian instead).

The language started diverging from the common ancestor language Old Norse sometime during the 13th century and became more distinct from the other emerging Scandinavian national languages with the first bible translation in 1550, establishing an orthography differing from that of Swedish, though written Danish is usually far easier for Swedes to understand than the spoken language. Modern spoken Danish is characterized by a very strong tendency of reduction of many sounds making it particularly difficult for foreigners to understand and properly master, not just by reputation but by sheer phonetic reality.

Classification and related languages

Danish belongs to the East Scandinavian languages, together with Swedish. Though Norwegian is classified as a West Scandinavian language together with Faroese and Icelandic, a more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility places Icelandic and Faroese in a separate Insular Scandinavian branch while Norwegian is considered to be a Mainland Scandinavian language and grouped with Danish and Swedish. Written Danish and Norwegian Bokmål are particularly close, though the phonology and prosody of all three languages differ somewhat. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can understand the others, though studies have shown that speakers of Norwegian generally understand both Danish and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand any of the other languages.

History

In the 8th century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, Proto-Norse, had undergone some changes and evolved into Old Norse. This language began to undergo new changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, which resulted in the appearance of two similar dialects, Old West Norse (Norway and Iceland) and Old East Norse (Denmark and Sweden).

Old East Norse is in Sweden called Runic Swedish and in Denmark Runic Danish, but until the 12th century, the dialect was the same in the two countries. The dialects are called runic due to the fact that the main body of text appears in the runic alphabet. Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the Younger Futhark alphabet, which only had 16 letters. Due to the limited number of runes, some runes were used for a range of phonemes, such as the rune for the vowel u which was also used for the vowels o, ø and y, and the rune for i which was also used for e.

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. There was also a change of au as in dauðr into ø as in døðr. 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".

From 1100 and onwards, the dialect of Denmark began to diverge from that of Sweden. The innovations spread unevenly from Denmark which created a series of minor dialectal boundaries, isoglosses, ranging from Zealand to Svealand.

Some famous authors of works in Danish are existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, prolific fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen, and playwright Ludvig Holberg. Three 20th century Danish authors have become Nobel Prize laureates in Literature: Karl Adolph Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan (joint recipients in 1917) and Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (awarded 1944).

Danish was once widely spoken in the northeast counties of England. Many Danish derived words such as gate (gade) for street, still survive in Yorkshire and other parts of eastern England colonized by Danish Vikings. The city of York was once the Danish settlement of Jorvik.

The first translation of the Bible in Danish was published in 1550.

Geographical distribution

Danish is the official language of Denmark, one of two official languages of Greenland (the other is Greenlandic), and one of two official languages of the Faeroes (the other is Faeroese). In addition, there is a small community of Danish speakers in Schleswig, the portion of Germany bordering Denmark, where it is an officially recognized and protected regional language. Furthermore, it is one of the official languages of the European Union.

Dialects

Standard Danish (rigsdansk or rigsmål) is the language based on dialects spoken in and around the capital of Copenhagen. Unlike Swedish and Norwegian, Danish does not have more than one regional speech norm. More than 20% of all Danish speakers live in the metropolitan area and most government agencies, institutions and major businesses keep their main offices in Copenhagen, something that has resulted in a very homogeneous national speech norm. Though Oslo and Stockholm are quite dominant in terms of speech standards, cities like Bergen, Gothenburg and the Malmö-Lund region are large and influential enough to create secondary regional norms, making the standard language more varied than is the case with Danish. The general agreement is that Standard Danish is based on a form of Copenhagen dialect, but the specific norm is, as with most language norms, difficult to pinpoint for both laymen and scholars. More distinct "genuine" dialects still exist in smaller communities, but most speakers in these areas generally speak a regionalized form of Standard Danish. Usually an adaption of the local dialect to rigsdansk is spoken, though code-switching between the neutralized norm and a distinct dialect is common.

Danish dialects are divided into three general dialect groups:

Østdansk or Københavnsk ("Eastern Danish") or ("Copenhagenish")
Ødansk ("Island Danish")
Jysk ("Jutlandish")

Historically, Eastern Danish includes what is today considered Southern Swedish dialects like Scanian and the dialect spoken on the island of Bornholm in the Baltic between the coasts Sweden and Germany. The background for this lies in the loss of originally Danish provinces like Blekinge, Halland and Skåne to Sweden in 1658. While many similarities can be found in Southern Swedish and the Bornholm dialect, they are more similar to the modern national standards than to each other. The Bornholm dialect has also maintained a distinction between three grammatical genders, rather than just two in Standard Danish and lacks the diphthongs used in the standard language.

Sound system

The sound system of Danish is in many ways unique among the world's languages. It is quite prone to considerable reduction and assimilation of both consonants and vowels even in very formal standard language. A rare feature is the presence of a prosodic feature called stød in Danish (lit. "push; thrust"), absent in some southern dialects. This is a form of laryngealization or creaky voice, occasionally realized as a glottal stop (especially in emphatic pronunciation). It can be the only distinguishing feature between certain words, thus creating minimal pairs (e.g. bønder "peasants" with stød vs. bønner "beans" without). The distribution of stød in the lexicon is clearly related to the distribution of the common Scandinavian tonal word accents found in most dialects of Norwegian and Swedish, including the national standard languages. Most linguists today believe that stød is a development of the word accents, rather than the other way round. Stød generally occurs in words that have "accent 1" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were monosyllabic in Old Norse, while no-stød occurs in words that have "accent 2" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were polysyllabic in Old Norse.

Unlike the neighboring Continental Scandinavian languages, the prosody of Danish does not have phonemic pitch. Stress is phonemic in and distinguishes words such as billigst "cheapest" and bilist [bi'list "car driver".

Vowels

	Front		Central		Back
	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded
Close (high)	i	y				u
Close-mid	e	ø				o
Mid			ə
Open-mid	ɛ	œ	ɐ			ɔ
Open (low)			a		ɑ	ɒ

Modern Standard Danish has 14 vowel phonemes, out of which all but two can be both long and short, schwa and . The long and short realizations often differ in quality and there are several allophones that differ if they occur together with an /r/. For example, /ø/ is lowered when it occurs either before or after /r/ and /a/ is pronounced when it's long.

Consonants

	Bilabial		Labio- dental		Alveolar		Alveolo- palatal		Palatal		Velar		Uvu- pharyngeal		Glottal
Plosives
Nasals
Fricatives							( )
Approximants
Lateral approximant

are devoiced in all contexts. often have slight frication, but are usually pronounced as approximants. The distinction between , / and is only made in the beginning of a word or at the beginning of a stressed syllable. Hence lappe and labbe are rendered . The combination of is realized as a alveolo-palatal fricative, , making it possible to postulate a tentative -phoneme in Danish. can be described as "tautosyllabic", meaning that it take the form of either a phonetic consonant or vowel. At the beginning of a word, it is pronounced as a uvular fricative, , but in most other positions it is either realised as a non-syllabic low central vowel, (which is almost identical to how /r/ is often pronounced in German) or simply coalesces with the preceding vowel. The phenomenon is also comparable to non-rhotic pronunciations of English.

Grammar

The infinitive forms of most Danish verbs end in a vowel, which in almost all cases is the letter e. Verbs are conjugated according to tense, but otherwise do not vary according to person or number. For example the present tense form of the Danish infinitive verb spise ("to eat") is spiser; this form is the same regardless of whether the subject is in the first, second, or third person, or whether it is singular or plural. This extreme ease of conjugating verbs is made up for by the many irregular verbs in the language.

Danish nouns fall into two grammatical genders: common and neuter. While the majority of nouns (ca. 90%) have the common gender and neuter is often used for inanimate objects, the genders of nouns are not generally predictable and must in most cases be memorized. A distinctive feature of the Scandinavian languages, including Danish, is an enclitic definite article. To demonstrate: The common gender word "a man" (indefinite) is en mand but "the man" (definite) is manden. The neuter equivalent would be "a house" (indefinite) et hus, "the house" (definite) huset. Even though the definite and indefinite articles have separate origins, they have become homographs. In the plural the definite articles is -(e)ne, whereas there is no indefinite article in the plural. The enclitic article is not used when an adjective is added to the noun; here the demonstrative pronoun is used instead: den store mand "the big man" and "the big house", det store hus.

Like most Germanic languages, Danish joins compound nouns. The example kvindehåndboldlandsholdet, "the female handball national team", illustrates that it does so to a significantly higher degree than English. In some cases, nouns are joined with an extra s, like landsmand (from land, "country", and mand, "man", meaning "compatriot"), but landmand (from same roots, meaning "farmer"). Some words are joined with an extra e, like gæstebog (from gæst and bog, meaning "guest book").

Vocabulary

Most Danish words are derived from the Old Norse language, with new words formed by compounding. A large percentage of Danish words, however, hails from Middle Saxon (for example, betale = to pay, måske = maybe). Later on, standard German and French and now English have superseded Low German influence. Because English and Danish are related languages, many common words are very similar in the two languages. For example, the following Danish words are easily recognizable in their written form to English speakers: have, over, under, for, kat. When pronounced, these words sound quite different from their English equivalents, however. In addition, the suffix by, meaning "town", occurs in several English placenames, such as Whitby and Selby, as remnants of the Viking occupation.

Numerals

In Danish numerals, the tens and units digits of numbers above 20 are reversed when spoken or written, such that 21 is rendered enogtyve or en-og-tyve, i.e. one and twenty. (The dashes in en-og-tyve and in the similar examples below are not commonly used, but are included here for clarity.) This is similar to German, Dutch and also to some variants of Bokmål Norwegian (sometimes known as Riksmål). Danish numerals from 50 to 90 are based on a vigesimal system similar to that of French not shared with the other Scandinavian languages. This means that the score (i.e. 20, tyve or, archaically, snes) is used as a base number: Tres (short for tre-sinds-tyve or tre snese) means 3 times 20, that is 60. Similarly, halvtreds (short for halvtred-sinds-tyve) means 2.5 times 20, that is 50. The numeral halvanden means 1.5 (literally "half second", i.e. the first plus half of the second). The numerals halvtredje (2.5) and halvfjerde (3.5), likewise constructed by "overcounting", are obsolete, but still implicitly used in the vigesimal system. The ending -indstyve is archaic in cardinal numbers, but still often used in ordinal numbers. Thus, "fifty-two" is usually rendered to-og-halvtreds, whereas "fifty-second" is either to-og-halvtredsende or to-og-halvtredsindstyvende. Most Danes are unaware of the vigesimal roots of such numerals.

Writing system

Danish is written using the Latin alphabet, with three additional letters: æ, ø, and å, which come at the end of the Danish alphabet, in that order. A spelling reform in 1948 introduced the letter å, already in use in Norwegian and Swedish, into the Danish alphabet to replace the letter aa; the old usage still occurs in some personal and geographical names and old documents (for example, the name of the city of Ålborg is often spelled Aalborg). When representing the å sound, aa is treated just like å in alphabetical sorting, even though it looks like two letters.

The same spelling reform changed the spelling of a few common words, such as vilde (would), kunde (could) and skulde (should), to their current forms of ville, kunne and skulle, and did away with the practice of capitalising all nouns, which German still does. Modern Danish and Norwegian use the same alphabet, though spelling differs somewhat.

References

Basbøll, Hans (2005) The Phonology of Danish ISBN 0-19-824268-9

External links

Danish language | Languages of Denmark | Languages of Germany | North Germanic languages

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