Danish is the mother tongue of around 5 million people in Denmark ...

... and also enjoys equal status with Faroese and Greenlandic respectively in official usage in the former Danish territories of the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Danish is also widespread in Iceland where for historical reasons it is still offered as the first foreign language in many Icelandic schools. There is also a Danish-speaking minority in South Schleswig in Germany (approx. 50 000 German nationals).

The Danish language began to crystallise in the 13th century from the other languages - Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian and Swedish - in the North Germanic (Nordic) group of the Indo- European family of languages. A characteristic feature separating the Nordic group from the other Germanic languages is the formation of the definite form of nouns using an inflectional suffix instead of a preceding article (Danish armen, English the arm, German der Arm). Subsequently, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian underwent a common evolution characterised by simplified paradigms and a rich intake of words from other, notably European, languages which has resulted in today's Danes being able to understand Swedish and Norwegian very well but not Faroese or Icelandic.

Danish uses the Roman alphabet with the additional letters æ, ø, and å. However, there is a great difference between spoken Danish and the written language. The written language is a conservative standard Danish which is far from reflecting the way Danes speak today. This does not necessarily make it harder to learn the language but, as a foreigner, one just has to be aware that, for example, the same combination of letters is not always pronounced identically! Phonetically, two features differentiate Danish from its neighbouring languages: a large number of vowels that are unusually close to one another and the Danish glottal stop, which is a kind of additional stress (closure of the vocal cords) that functions as a separator of meaning: læser pronounced with a glottal stop is a verb, whereas without the glottal stop it is a noun.

Listed above are some of the features that can make foreigners think Danish is a difficult language. Conversely, it has to be added that it is far from having the complicated declensions and conjugations found in some other languages in Europe (German, Finnish.). Just as it is possible to read and write English without being able to speak it, one can easily learn to read a Danish text without necessarily being able to pronounce the words.

There are many good reasons for learning Danish: historically, it is a language of culture in which pioneering major works of literature and thought have been written (Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Andersen and Karen Blixen), it is a unique key to understanding Danish culture which is otherwise difficult for foreigners to penetrate and it is nowadays a language boasting a lively literary and artistic output.

Danes are often described as a kind of Nordic Mediterraneans because by nature they are frequently (southern) extroverts who wish to participate in the world around them, while at the same time having a (Nordic) tendency to isolate and barricade themselves behind their culture and traditions. As in the rest of Europe, knowledge of the language is one of the best means of access to the people and, precisely because the Danes have retained their distinctive cultural identity just as much as other peoples in Europe, it is important for the whole of Europe and not only the Danes themselves to know one of the best keys to that people, which is their language.

Peter Hjortsø