33 Facts About Danish language

Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by about six million people, principally in Denmark, as well as Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and the northern German region of Southern Schleswig, where it has minority language status.

Minor Danish language-speaking communities are found in Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina.

Until the 16th century, Danish language was a continuum of dialects spoken from Schleswig to Scania with no standard variety or spelling conventions.

Today, traditional Danish dialects have all but disappeared, though regional variants of the standard language exist.

The main differences in Danish language are between generations, with youth Danish language being particularly innovative.

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Danish language has a very large vowel inventory consisting of 27 phonemically distinctive vowels, and its prosody is characterized by the distinctive phenomenon, a kind of laryngeal phonation type.

Danish language has absorbed a large number of loan words, most of which were borrowed from Middle Low German in the late medieval period.

Danish is a North Germanic language descended from Old Norse, and English is a West Germanic language descended from Old English.

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.

East Danish provinces were lost to Sweden after the Second Treaty of Bromsebro after which they were gradually Swedified; just as Norway was politically severed from Denmark, beginning a gradual end of Danish influence on Norwegian .

Literary Danish language continued to develop with the works of Ludvig Holberg, whose plays and historical and scientific works laid the foundation for the Danish language literary canon.

The influence of popular literary role models, together with increased requirements of education did much to strengthen the Danish language, and started a period of homogenization, whereby the Copenhagen standard language gradually displaced the regional vernacular languages.

In 1911 Danish language was spoken by nearly 5 million people, mainly in Denmark and Iceland.

Three 20th-century Danish authors have become Nobel Prize laureates in Literature: Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan and Johannes V Jensen .

Minor regional pronunciation variation of the standard Danish language, sometimes called remain, and are in some cases vital.

Today, the major varieties of Standard Danish language 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.

Also, in the 21st century, the influence of immigration has had linguistic consequences, such as the emergence of a so-called multiethnolect in the urban areas, an immigrant Danish variety, combining elements of different immigrant languages such as Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish, as well as English and Danish.

Danish was an official language in Iceland until 1944, but is today still widely used and is a mandatory subject in school taught as a second foreign language after English.

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.

Standard Danish is the language based on dialects spoken in and around the capital, Copenhagen.

Insular Danish language is divided into Zealand, Funen, Møn, and Lolland-Falster dialect areas?each with addition internal variation.

The term "Eastern Danish language" is occasionally used for Bornholmian, but including the dialects of Scania ?Jutlandic dialect, Insular Danish language, and Bornholmian.

Bornholmian is the only Eastern Danish language dialect spoken in Denmark, since the other Eastern Danish language dialects were spoken in areas ceded to Sweden and subsequently swedified.

Standard Danish has two genders and the definite form of nouns is formed by the use of suffixes, while Western Jutlandic has only one gender and the definite form of nouns uses an article before the noun itself, in the same fashion as West Germanic languages.

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Sound system of Danish language is unusual, particularly in its large vowel inventory and in the unusual prosody.

In informal or rapid speech, the Danish language is prone to considerable reduction of unstressed syllables, creating many vowel-less syllables with syllabic consonants, as well as reduction of final consonants.

Danish language intonation has been described by Nina Grønnum as a hierarchical model where components such as the stress group, sentence type and prosodic phrase are combined, and where the stress group is the main intonation unit and in Copenhagen Standard Danish language mainly has a certain pitch pattern that reaches its lowest peak on the stressed syllable followed by its highest peak on the following unstressed syllable, after which it declines gradually until the next stress group.

Standard Danish language has two nominal genders: common and neuter; the common gender arose as the historical feminine and masculine genders conflated into a single category.

Danish language verbs are morphologically simple, marking very few grammatical categories.

Large numbers, Danish language uses the long scale, so that the short-scale billion is called, and the short-scale trillion is.

However, Danish is a V2 language, which means that the verb must always be the second constituent of the sentence.

Danish language orthography is conservative, using most of the conventions established in the 16th century.