| DANISH LANGUAGE
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SOME FACTS
Danish language, member of the North Germanic,
or Scandinavian, group of the Germanic subfamily
of the Indo-European family of languages.
The official language of Denmark, it is
spoken by over 5 million people, most of
whom live in Denmark; however, there are
some Danish speakers in Greenland, the Faeroe
Islands, Iceland, and the United States.
Like the other Scandinavian languages, Danish
is derived from Old Norse, and by the first
half of the 12th cent. it could be distinguished
from the parent tongue. Between 1100 and
1800 a number of phonological changes took
place in Danish, and the grammar became
increasingly simple. The spelling and pronunciation
of the language began to be standardized
c.1700, and a modern standard Danish can
be said to have existed since about 1800,
although there are still a number of dialects.
Danish grammar is comparatively simple.
The noun is inflected only to show the possessive
and plural forms and has but two genders,
neuter and nonneuter (or common). The meaning
of nouns that are otherwise the same can
depend on gender. For example, when used
in the nonneuter ore means “coin,”
whereas used in the neuter ore means “ear.”
Homonyms may also be differentiated in Danish
by the use of a stod, or glottal stop, which
is a sound that results from the closing
and opening of the glottis to expel air.
Verbs have no personal inflection. Although
the vocabulary of Danish is substantially
native, many words have been borrowed from
other languages, notably from Low German
in the 14th to 16th cent.; from High German,
Latin, and French in the 16th to 19th cent.;
and from English since the late 19th cent.
Because of the large number of similar and
identical words in Danish, Norwegian, and
Swedish, a knowledge of any one of these
languages makes it possible to understand
the spoken and written forms of the other
two. Since c.1100, Danish has used the Roman
alphabet, to which three symbols representing
three vowels, a (written as aa before 1948)
and o, have been added.
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