- Official language in
- Denmark
- Also spoken in
- Faroe Islands, Germany
- Script
- Latin
Where it's spoken
Denmark's constitution contains no provision naming an official language. Denmark's Administration of Justice Act, however, states that the language of the courts is Danish. The European Federation of National Institutions for Language (EFNIL) describes Danish as the official language of Denmark, and as one of the official languages of the European Union since Denmark joined the European Communities.
In the Faroe Islands, an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Home Rule Act acknowledges Faroese as the principal language, while providing that Danish shall be taught well and, together with Faroese, may be used in public affairs. In Greenland, another self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Self-Government Act's chapter on language states only that Greenlandic is the official language in Greenland. In Germany, the constitution of the state of Schleswig-Holstein guarantees protection and support to the national Danish minority in the south of the country, whose native or cultural language, according to EFNIL, is Danish.
Sources
- The Constitutional Act of Denmark (Danmarks Riges Grundlov), 5 June 1953 — comparative Danish/English text — Full-text search for any language provision
- Bekendtgørelse af lov om rettens pleje (Retsplejeloven), LBK nr. 1255 af 16/11/2015, Justitsministeriet — § 149
- European Federation of National Institutions for Language (EFNIL), "Denmark/Danemark", Language Legislation in Europe project — Section "Legal framework"
- Act on Greenland Self-Government, Act no. 473 of 12 June 2009 (official English translation, Statsministeriet) — Chapter 7, § 20
- Home Rule Act of the Faroe Islands, No. 137 of 23 March 1948 (official English translation, Statsministeriet) — Section 11
- Verfassung des Landes Schleswig-Holstein (consolidated text) — Art. 5 Abs. 2
Script & pronunciation
Danish is written in the Latin alphabet (Unicode's script code Latn). According to Dansk Sprognævn (the Danish Language Council), the Danish alphabet has 29 letters: the ordinary Latin letters, followed by æ, ø and å. Sprognævnet's own account of the alphabet states that å only replaced the older digraph aa in the mid-twentieth century, and that a separate government notice then fixed å's place as the very last letter of the alphabet, rather than at the front where aa had stood. Because of this history, Sprognævnet itself notes that place names still spelled with the older aa, such as Aabenraa, are in fact alphabetized at the end of the alphabet together with å, not at the front where a foreign visitor unfamiliar with this rule might expect to find them.
This app's Danish cards have no separate romanization line; the text field is the ordinary Danish spelling. The card for "æblemost" ("Æblemost — unsweetened pressed apple juice") contains æ, the card for "blå" ("Blue") contains å, and the card for "øst" ("East") contains ø.
Sources
- Unicode ISO 15924 code table, entry "Latn" — Code Latn, English name Latin
- Dansk Sprognævn, "Aabenraas plads. En dokumentation." Nyt fra Sprognævnet 1997/4 (december) — Alphabetisation of aa/å, 29-letter alphabet
Grammar essentials
The standard word order of Danish is subject-verb-object. According to a study of verb placement in Danish and Swedish based on the Nordic Word Order Database, Danish declarative main clauses standardly have verb-second (V2) word order, meaning the finite verb stands in second position in the clause. This app's card "Vis venligst dit pas" ("Please show your passport") illustrates the same pattern: its grammar note explains that Danish main clauses always place the finite verb second, and that imperative sentences begin with the verb itself. Fronting a different constituent still leaves the finite verb in second position: this app's card "Spiritus må vi kun sælge, hvis du er fyldt 18." ("We may only sell spirits if you are 18 or over.") fronts the object "Spiritus," and its grammar note explains that this places the verb "må" ahead of the subject "vi" under the V2 rule.
The same study finds that negation cannot stand before the finite verb in a Danish main clause, judging an example with the negator ikke placed before the verb to be ungrammatical. This app's cards agree: the card "Jeg taler ikke dansk" ("I can't speak Danish") has a grammar note stating that Danish negation places "ikke" after the verb.
Danish subordinate clauses, unlike main clauses, are not verb-second: the same study describes the embedded verb as staying in place after sentence-medial adverbs rather than moving to second position, and gives a Danish relative clause example, "som jeg altid spiser croissant på" ("that I always eat croissant on"), in which the subject and the adverb altid ("always") both precede the verb spiser, which is in turn followed by its object — so the subordinate verb is not final either.
Danish nouns have one of two grammatical genders, common gender or neuter, and the gender decides the noun's definite singular ending. The Danish Language Council's official spelling dictionary states that most nouns have only one of the two genders, shown for each headword — for example, "kannibal" takes the common-gender ending "-en", while "flag" takes the neuter ending "-et". This app's card "Hvad koster en enkelt træning, og hvad koster kontingentet?" ("What does a single session cost, and what are the membership dues?") illustrates the same pattern: its grammar note explains that "kontingent" is neuter and takes "-et" ("kontingentet"), while a common-gender noun such as "træning" instead takes "-en" ("træningen").
The same dictionary rule notes that for some words, the two genders of an identical spelling correspond to two different meanings. This app's card for "frø" ("Frog") shows the same pattern: its grammar note explains that the common-gender "en frø" is the frog, while the neuter "et frø" is a seed, so gender alone distinguishes the two.
Sources
- Dansk Sprognævn, Retskrivningsordbogen, § 20 "Fælleskøn eller intetkøn?" (accessed via Wayback Machine; the live page renders client-side and returns no static text) — § 20, points (1) and (3)
- Westendorp, Maud (2021). "Verb placement variation in Swedish and Danish." Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol. 6.1, 49–72 — §1 Introduction, §2.2
Politeness & etiquette
According to a linguistic study of the Danish address pronoun De, the German pronoun Sie served as a historical model for the Danish formal pronoun De, an address word that today indexes an "old" style in Danish, much like the titles Hr. ("Mr.") and Fru ("Mrs."). The same study describes De as having "almost fallen out of use" and as no longer part of the daily exchange of words in Danish, unlike Sie and vous, which remain part of everyday interaction in German and French. It links this retreat of De to a Danish egalitarian outlook that grew out of the popular enlightenment and social democracy and was consolidated through the anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchy discourses of the mid-twentieth century, and it describes the Danish "du" as carrying much the same inclusive, egalitarian ethos as the English "you."
The same study describes today's De as, for most speakers, "a nice-to-have word, not a need-to-have word," and says that Danish "De discourse" has a "royal ring": in real interaction, the study finds pockets of serious De use not only in the Danish royal family but also, in what it calls "residual conservatism," in certain business settings and shops.
This app's cards describe the same situation for travellers. The card "Taler du engelsk?" ("Do you speak English?") has a grammar note stating that Danish uses "du" even with strangers and that the formal "De" is now almost obsolete. The card "Kan I varme den her?" ("Could you heat this up?") explains that the plural "you" is "I," always capitalized to keep it distinct from other words, that a single person is addressed as "du," and that the polite "De" now survives almost only in royal contexts.