From WikiLang
 Danish pages
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| Introduction · Pronouns · Gender · Plurality |
| Germanic Languages | |
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| Eastern Germanic |  Gothic
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| Northern Germanic | Danish ·  Faroese ·  Icelandic ·  Norwegian (Bokmål) · Norwegian (Nynorsk) ·  Old Norse ·  Swedish
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| Western Germanic |  Afrikaans ·  Dutch ·  English ·  Frisian ·  German ·  Old English
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Welcome to the wikilang introduction page for the Danish language, or as we call it, dansk!
Contents |
Introduction to the language
History
Old East Norse began to split apart from Old Norse, then Old Danish began to split away from Old East Norse around the 12th century, then it was all uphill from there! The language of modern Danish as we understand it today began in the early 1100s, before that, the languages spoken in modern day Sweden and Denmark were much the same. This language was written with the Younger Futhark runic alphabet, however over time, Denmark switched to the Latin alphabet. The first book printed in the Danish language dates from 1495, but the Latin script wasn't "officially" accepted for Danish until 1955.
Notable Danish authors include existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen, and playwright Ludvig Holberg. Three 20th century Danish writers have been nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature: Karl Adolph Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan (both in 1917) and Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (awarded 1944).
Family
Indo-European
- Germanic
- North Germanic
- East Scandinavian
- Danish
- East Scandinavian
- North Germanic
Spoken in
95% of the population of Denmark speaks Danish as their mother language, and Danish also has official status and is a mandatory subject in school in Greenland and the Faroe Islands, two old Danish territories, and is a required subject in Iceland. A substantial community of 50,000 speakers exists in the northern German territory of Schleswig-Holstein, and smaller communities are present in Argentina, Canada, and the USA.
An important fact should be known about Scandinavian languages. They create a dialect continuum, so there doesn't really exist distinct lines between where Danish stops and Swedish, for example, begins. The Swedish region of Scania (or Skåne) speaks a very distinct dialect that is generally described as being more like dialects of Danish, than of Swedish. In fact, this region and surrounding areas (collectively known as Skåneland) belonged to Denmark until the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658. Before that, they would have been considered Danish speaking areas.
