OVERVIEW

Danish is part of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family. It is spoken by about five million people in Denmark, the Faeroes, and Greenland.

There is a large body of oral ballads from the medieval period. Danish was first written in the thirteenth century, and the Bible was translated into Danish during the Reformation.

Dictionary

Our Danish dictionary with translations into English

English-Danish lexicon. 65,806 bytes
Danish-English lexicon. 58,475 bytes Freeware data from freedict.com.

English-Danish lexicon. 185,642 bytes
Danish-English lexicon. 149,685 bytes
Freeware data from Ergane.

ORTHOGRAPHY

The same 26 letters as English plus œ, å, and ø.

PHONOLOGY

Consonants

Stops: p, b, t, d, k, g, ʔ

Fricatives: f, v, s, ʃ. h, ð, ɤ, j

Nasals: m, n, ŋ

Lateral: l

Uvular trill: ʀ

Vowels

Front: i, e, ɛ, y, ø, œ

Central: a

Back: ɔ, o, u

Neutral: ə

All consonants are short. Danish spelling is slightly irregular; for instance initial p, t, k are aspirated; non-initially all of the stops become vocalized and unaspirated; g is silent in certain environments.

The glottal stop (stød) is equivalent to the acute tone in Norwegian and Swedish.

Stress is usually on the first syllable of the root.

MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX

Word Order

SVO. OVS can be used for emphasis.

Articles

The definite article is formed by a suffix: –en = common, –et = neuter, –ene the plural of either gender. If an adjective is present, the suffix is replaced by the demonstratives den, det andde.

Nouns

There are two genders: common and neuter. Nouns are pluralized in -e, -(e)r, or ∅. The genitive suffix is -s, all other cases are indicated by prepositions.

Adjectives

Adjectives precede the noun. They add -t if the noun is a neuter singular. Comparatives are made using -(e)re.

Pronouns

Personal Pronouns

Possessive Pronouns

Interrogative Pronouns

Numerals