Danish - interesting facts
Approximately 6 million people worldwide, roughly 0.1% of the global population, are native Danish speakers despite being spoken by less than 0.1% of the world's inhabitants, Danish ranks just outside of the top hundred most widely spoken languages.
Danish is the official language of Denmark and the Faroe Islands and is also recognised as a minority language in Germany and Greenland.
The Danish language is part of the Germanic family, specifically the North Germanic subgroup. Like Swedish, it originated from Old Norse and began evolving into a separate language around the 11th century. It was initially written in the Latin alphabet, replacing the used runic script. One of the oldest pieces of Danish literature is the 13th-century Codex Holmiensis, which includes the Jutland Law enforced for the next four centuries. The modern Danish language began in the 17th century, based on the Zealand dialect. Today, the Danish Language Council regulates language-related matters.
There are three main dialectal groups in the Danish language: East Danish (østdansk), Insular Danish (ødansk), and Jutlandic (jysk). Due to the high proportion of Danes living in the Copenhagen metropolitan area, the capital's dialect has a high social prestige, while local variants gradually lose their importance.
Danish shares genetic similarities with Swedish and Norwegian (Bokmål), and the three languages are considered mutually intelligible. This is evidenced by the fact that Danes can effectively communicate in their native language with residents of Sweden and Norway.
Danish is one of the official languages of the European Union and the Nordic Council.
A distinguishing feature of Danish among other languages is the enormous number of vowels. There are 27, including 12 long, 13 short, and two schwa vowels, which only occur in unaccented syllables. A classic example of the high frequency of vowels is a sentence in the Jutland dialect composed entirely of single-vowel words: "A e u o æ ø i æ å", meaning "I am on the island (located) on the river."
Much like in Swedish, definite articles (equivalent to 'the' in English) are attached to the end of the noun, e.g. 'bil' (car) → 'bilen'.
Danish grammar features two grammatical genders: common (resulting from the combination of masculine and feminine) and neuter.
A characteristic feature of the Danish lexis is the occurrence of extremely long compound nouns. For example, one of the longest words in this language, a 30-letter noun 'ejendomsavancebeskatningsloven', corresponds to the phrase 'capital gains tax law' in English.
Meanwhile, due to a cluster of seven consonants, one of the most difficult Danish words to pronounce is 'angstskrig' (scream of fear).
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