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73-696: The Caritas Well ( Danish : Caritasbrønden ), also known as the Caritas Fountain (Danish: Caritasspringvandet), is the oldest fountain in Copenhagen , Denmark. It was built in 1608 by Christian IV and is located on Gammeltorv , now part of the Strøget pedestrian zone . It is known for the Golden Apples "jumping" on the Queen's birthday. The figure group is originally carved in wood by

146-429: A "difficult language to learn, acquire and understand", and some evidence shows that children are slower to acquire the phonological distinctions of Danish compared with other languages. The grammar is moderately inflective with strong (irregular) and weak (regular) conjugations and inflections. Nouns, adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns distinguish common and neutral gender. Like English, Danish only has remnants of

219-518: A change is quite a recent development, as well as change Cve > Cvø . Faroese is a highly variable language with many dialects actively used across the islands’ approximately 120 communities. While the dialect of Tórshavn is the most prominent due to the city's outstanding size, there is no official spoken standard variety, and little evidence that the Tórshavn dialect has developed prestige status. Faroese speech communities are tightly knit and

292-577: A former case system , particularly in the pronouns. Unlike English, it has lost all person marking on verbs. Its word order is V2 , with the finite verb always occupying the second slot in the sentence. Danish is a Germanic language of the North Germanic branch . Other names for this group are the Nordic or Scandinavian languages. Along with Swedish, Danish descends from the Eastern dialects of

365-526: A literary language. Also in this period, Danish began to take on the linguistic traits that differentiate it from Swedish and Norwegian, such as the stød , the voicing of many stop consonants, and the weakening of many final vowels to /e/. The first printed book in Danish dates from 1495, the Rimkrøniken ( Rhyming Chronicle ), a history book told in rhymed verses. The first complete translation of

438-599: A more definitive study of the language's variation, noting distinguishing characteristics of the north–south divide such as the northern aspiration of unvoiced plosives after long vowels and the pronunciation of ⟨ó⟩ as / œ / in most of the north compared to / ɔ / in the south. The most recent and detailed classification by Hjalmar P. Petersen divides the language into four major varieties including North-Western Faroese, Central Faroese, Northern Faroese, and Southern Faroese. Additional sub-dialects of particular islands and villages have also been identified. Most of

511-707: A number of Danes remained as a minority within German territories . After the occupation of Denmark by Germany in World War II, the 1948 orthography reform dropped the German-influenced rule of capitalizing nouns, and introduced the letter ⟨å⟩ . Three 20th-century Danish authors have become Nobel Prize laureates in Literature : Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan (joint recipients in 1917) and Johannes V. Jensen (awarded 1944). With

584-482: A similarity in pronunciation, combined with the long tradition of having Danish as a written language, which has led to similarities in vocabulary. Among younger Danes, Copenhageners are worse at understanding Swedish than Danes from the provinces. In general, younger Danes are not as good at understanding the neighboring languages as the young in Norway and Sweden. The Danish philologist Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen divided

657-586: A so-called multiethnolect in the urban areas, an immigrant Danish variety (also known as Perkerdansk ), combining elements of different immigrant languages such as Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish, as well as English and Danish. Within the Danish Realm , Danish is the national language of Denmark and one of two official languages of the Faroe Islands (alongside Faroese ). There is a Faroese variant of Danish known as Gøtudanskt . Until 2009, Danish

730-625: A variant of Standard Danish, Southern Schleswig Danish , is spoken in the area. Since 2015, Schleswig-Holstein has officially recognized Danish as a regional language , just as German is north of the border. Furthermore, Danish is one of the official languages of the European Union and one of the working languages of the Nordic Council . Under the Nordic Language Convention , Danish-speaking citizens of

803-407: A very large vowel inventory consisting of 27 phonemically distinctive vowels , and its prosody is characterized by the distinctive phenomenon stød , a kind of laryngeal phonation type . Due to the many pronunciation differences that set Danish apart from its neighboring languages, particularly the vowels, difficult prosody and "weakly" pronounced consonants, it is sometimes considered to be

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876-571: Is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken by about six million people, principally in and around Denmark . Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland , the Faroe Islands , and the northern German region of Southern Schleswig , where it has minority language status. Minor Danish-speaking communities are also found in Norway , Sweden ,

949-700: Is a West Germanic language descended from Old English. Old Norse exerted a strong influence on Old English in the early medieval period. The shared Germanic heritage of Danish and English is demonstrated with many common words that are very similar in the two languages. For example, when written, commonly used Danish verbs, nouns, and prepositions such as have , over , under , for , give , flag , salt , and arm are easily recognizable to English speakers. Similarly, some other words are almost identical to their Scots equivalents, e.g. kirke (Scots kirk , i.e., 'church') or barn (Scots and northern English bairn , i.e. 'child'). In addition,

1022-436: Is a form of Old Norse spoken in medieval times in the Faroe Islands. The most crucial aspects of the development of Faroese are diphthongisation and palatalisation . There is not enough data available to establish an accurate chronology of Faroese, but a rough one may be developed through comparison to the chronologies of Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. In the 12th/13th centuries, á and ǫ́ merged as /ɔː/ ; later on at

1095-430: Is its closest relative. East Germanic languages West Germanic languages Icelandic Faroese Norwegian Danish Swedish Approximately 2,000 uncompounded Danish words are derived from Old Norse and ultimately from Proto Indo-European . Of these 2,000, 1,200 are nouns, 500 are verbs and 180 are adjectives. Danish has also absorbed many loanwords , most of which were borrowed from Low German of

1168-556: Is pronounced [ɔu] and short ⟨ó⟩ is pronounced [œ] . The Faroese alphabet consists of 29 letters derived from the Latin script : As with most other Germanic languages, Faroese has a large number of vowels, with 26 in total. Vowel distribution is similar to other North Germanic languages in that short vowels appear in closed syllables (those ending in consonant clusters or long consonants) and long vowels appearing in open syllables. Faroese shares with Icelandic and Danish

1241-565: Is transmitted in the language, alongside all local newspapers. Today, Danish is considered a foreign language, although around 5% of residents on the Faroes learn it as a first language. Both Danish and English are obligatory at the primary and secondary school levels, with fluency in English becoming increasingly valued particularly among the younger generations. Films and television are frequently shown in English with Danish subtitles. In 2017,

1314-436: The skarre-R , the uvular R sound ( [ʁ] ), began spreading through Denmark, likely through influence from Parisian French and German. It affected all of the areas where Danish had been influential, including all of Denmark, Southern Sweden, and coastal southern Norway. In the 18th century, Danish philology was advanced by Rasmus Rask , who pioneered the disciplines of comparative and historical linguistics, and wrote

1387-623: The Bible in Danish, the Bible of Christian II translated by Christiern Pedersen , was published in 1550. Pedersen's orthographic choices set the de facto standard for subsequent writing in Danish. From around 1500, several printing presses were in operation in Denmark publishing in Danish and other languages. In the period after 1550, presses in Copenhagen dominated the publication of material in

1460-785: The Gospel of John in Faroese. In 1937, Faroese replaced Danish as the official school language, in 1938, as the church language, and in 1948, as the national language by the Home Rule Act of the Faroe Islands. The first complete translation of the Bible was completed in 1948. Up until the 1980s public radio broadcasts were primarily conducted in Norwegian and Danish. This helps to explain why older generations can speak Norwegian in addition to Danish and Faroese. Faroese broadcasts quickly replaced earlier programs and now all radio content

1533-570: The Late Middle Ages . Out of the 500 most frequently used Danish words, 100 are loans from Middle Low German; this is because Low German was the second official language of Denmark–Norway. In the 17th and 18th centuries, standard German and French superseded Low German influence, and in the 20th century, English became the main supplier of loanwords, especially after World War II . Although many old Nordic words remain, some were replaced with borrowed synonyms, for example æde (to eat)

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1606-523: The Old Norse language ; Danish and Swedish are also classified as East Scandinavian or East Nordic languages. Scandinavian languages are often considered a dialect continuum , where no sharp dividing lines are seen between the different vernacular languages. Like Norwegian and Swedish, Danish was significantly influenced by Low German in the Middle Ages, and has been influenced by English since

1679-1091: The United States , Canada , Brazil , and Argentina . Along with the other North Germanic languages, Danish is a descendant of Old Norse , the common language of the Germanic peoples who lived in Scandinavia during the Viking Era . Danish, together with Swedish, derives from the East Norse dialect group , while the Middle Norwegian language (before the influence of Danish) and Norwegian Bokmål are classified as West Norse along with Faroese and Icelandic . A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Danish, Norwegian , and Swedish as "mainland (or continental ) Scandinavian", while Icelandic and Faroese are classified as "insular Scandinavian". Although

1752-544: The Zealand dialect Introductio ad lingvam Danicam puta selandicam ; and in 1685 the first Danish grammar written in Danish, Den Danske Sprog-Kunst ("The Art of the Danish Language") by Peder Syv . Major authors from this period are Thomas Kingo , poet and psalmist, and Leonora Christina Ulfeldt , whose novel Jammersminde ( Remembered Woes ) is considered a literary masterpiece by scholars. Orthography

1825-598: The [ɔu:] and [œ] found in Tórshavn and elsewhere. The northern dialect is characterized by weakened fortis consonants and a monophthongal pronunciation of ⟨á⟩ in ending syllables, i.e., / aː / . The realization of ⟨ei⟩ as [ɔi:] dominates in this region, although small parts of the central and northwestern regions use this pronunciation as well. The northwestern dialect features aspirated fortis consonants after long vowels. The ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ vowels remain unmerged in unstressed ending syllables. Long ⟨ó⟩

1898-402: The introduction of the printing press , a standard language was developed which was based on the educated dialect of Copenhagen and Malmö . It spread through use in the education system and administration, though German and Latin continued to be the most important written languages well into the 17th century. Following the loss of territory to Germany and Sweden, a nationalist movement adopted

1971-562: The outfield ), cf. Middle Irish áirge . Between the 9th and the 15th centuries, a distinct Faroese language evolved, although it was probably still mutually intelligible with Old West Norse , and remained similar to the Norn language of Orkney and Shetland during Norn's earlier phase. Faroese ceased to be a written language after the Danish–Norwegian Reformation of the early 16th century, with Danish replacing Faroese as

2044-579: The 9th century with the younger futhark . Possibly as far back as the seventh century, the common Norse language began to undergo changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, resulting in the appearance of two dialect areas, Old West Norse ( Norway and Iceland ) and Old East Norse ( Denmark and Sweden ). Most of the changes separating East Norse from West Norse started as innovations in Denmark, that spread through Scania into Sweden and by maritime contact to southern Norway. A change that separated Old East Norse (Runic Swedish/Danish) from Old West Norse

2117-594: The Danish language, and also started a period of homogenization, whereby the Copenhagen standard language gradually displaced the regional vernacular languages. Throughout the 19th century, Danes emigrated, establishing small expatriate communities in the Americas, particularly in the United States, Canada, and Argentina, where memory and some use of Danish remains today. After the Schleswig referendum in 1920 ,

2190-517: The Danish language. Herrer og Narre have frit Sprog . "Lords and jesters have free speech." Peder Syv , proverbs Following the first Bible translation, the development of Danish as a written language , as a language of religion, administration, and public discourse accelerated. In the second half of the 17th century, grammarians elaborated grammars of Danish, first among them Rasmus Bartholin 's 1657 Latin grammar De studio lingvæ danicæ ; then Laurids Olufsen Kock 's 1660 grammar of

2263-407: The Danish tongue." Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson By the eighth century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, Proto-Norse , had undergone some changes and evolved into Old Norse . This language was generally called the "Danish tongue" ( Dǫnsk tunga ), or "Norse language" ( Norrœnt mál ). Norse was written in the runic alphabet , first with the elder futhark and from

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2336-654: The Faroes: for example, the names of Mykines , Stóra Dímun , Lítla Dímun and Argir have been hypothesized to contain Celtic roots. Other examples of early-introduced words of Celtic origin are: blak / blaðak ( buttermilk ), cf. Middle Irish bláthach ; drunnur (tail-piece of an animal), cf. Middle Irish dronn ; grúkur ( head , headhair), cf. Middle Irish gruaig ; lámur ( hand , paw ), cf. Middle Irish lámh ; tarvur ( bull ), cf. Middle Irish tarbh ; and ærgi ( pasture in

2409-487: The German wood carver Statius Otto in Elsinore for casts afterwards to be made in bronze . The figures depict the greatest of the three theological virtues , love or charity ( caritas in Latin ), symbolised by a pregnant mother with her children. The figures stand on a column in a copper basin. The copper basin is raised above a lower basin on a stone pillar. The female figure sprays water from her breasts while

2482-500: The Icelandic grammarian and politician Jón Sigurðsson published a written standard for Modern Faroese in 1854, which still exists. They set a standard for the orthography of the language, based on its Old Norse roots and similar to that of Icelandic. The main purpose of this was for the spelling to represent the diverse dialects of Faroese in equal measure. Additionally, it had the advantages of being etymologically clear and keeping

2555-580: The Nordic countries have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable for any interpretation or translation costs. Faroese language It is one of five languages descended from Old West Norse spoken in the Middle Ages ; the others include Norwegian , Icelandic , and the extinct Norn and Greenlandic Norse . Faroese and Icelandic, its closest extant relative, are not easily mutually intelligible in speech, but

2628-710: The Old Norse word for "island". This monophthongization started in Jutland and spread eastward, having spread throughout Denmark and most of Sweden by 1100. Through Danish conquest, Old East Norse was once widely spoken in the northeast counties of England . Many words derived from Norse, such as "gate" ( gade ) for street, still survive in Yorkshire , the East Midlands and East Anglia, and parts of eastern England colonized by Danish Vikings . The city of York

2701-406: The analysis by Petersen and earlier authors is based on phonological evidence. The southern variety of Faroese is very distinct, possibly due to geographic distance exacerbated by the lack of underwater tunnels which have connected most other islands north of Sandur . The dialect of these islands is characterized by a unique form of certain personal pronouns, alongside phonological features such as

2774-600: The area, eventually outnumbering the Danish speakers. The political loss of territory sparked a period of intense nationalism in Denmark, coinciding with the so-called " Golden Age " of Danish culture. Authors such as N.F.S. Grundtvig emphasized the role of language in creating national belonging. Some of the most cherished Danish-language authors of this period are existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and prolific fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen . The influence of popular literary role models, together with increased requirements of education did much to strengthen

2847-461: The beginning of the 14th century, delabialization took place: y , øy , au > /i, ɔi, ɛi/ ; í and ý merged in addition to i and y , but in the case of í and ý , it appears that labialisation took place instead as is documented by later development to /ʊi/ . Further, the language underwent a palatalisation of k , g and sk before Old Norse e , i , y , ø , au > /kʲ, ɡʲ, skʲ/ > /cᶜ̧, ɟᶨ, ɕcᶜ̧/ > /tʃʰ, tʃ, ʃ/ . Before

2920-441: The dissolution of þ ( þ > t ; þ > h in demonstrative pronouns and adverbs) appeared before the end of the 13th century. Another undated change is the merger of ǫ , ø and ǿ into /ø/ ; pre-nasal ǫ , ǫ́ > o , ó . enk , eng probably became eing , eink in the 14th century; the development of a to /ɛ/ before ng , nk appeared after the palatalisation of k , g , and sk had been completed, such

2993-508: The exclusive use of rigsdansk , the High Copenhagen Standard, in national broadcasting, the traditional dialects came under increased pressure. In the 20th century, they have all but disappeared, and the standard language has extended throughout the country. Minor regional pronunciation variation of the standard language, sometimes called regionssprog ("regional languages") remain, and are in some cases vital. Today,

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3066-478: The feature of maintaining a contrast between stops based exclusively on aspiration, not voicing. Geminated stops may be pre-aspirated in intervocalic and word-final position. Intervocalically the aspirated consonants become pre-aspirated unless followed by a closed vowel. In clusters, the preaspiration merges with a preceding nasal or apical approximant, rendering them voiceless. There are several phonological processes involved in Faroese, including: Faroese grammar

3139-451: The first English-language grammar of Danish. Literary Danish continued to develop with the works of Ludvig Holberg , whose plays and historical and scientific works laid the foundation for the Danish literary canon. With the Danish colonization of Greenland by Hans Egede , Danish became the administrative and religious language there, while Iceland and the Faroe Islands had the status of Danish colonies with Danish as an official language until

3212-426: The history of Danish into a period from 800 AD to 1525 to be "Old Danish", which he subdivided into "Runic Danish" (800–1100), Early Middle Danish (1100–1350) and Late Middle Danish (1350–1525). Móðir Dyggva var Drótt, dóttir Danps konungs, sonar Rígs er fyrstr var konungr kallaðr á danska tungu . " Dyggvi 's mother was Drott, the daughter of king Danp, Ríg 's son, who was the first to be called king in

3285-530: The intervocalic voicing of non- geminate stops. The fortis consonants / p / , / t / , and / k / are aspirated following long vowels. The central dialect area centered around Suðurstreymoy features a merging of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ in unstressed ending syllables. The fortis consonants are neither aspirated nor weakened. The island of Nólsoy is a notable transitional area due to its unique realization of long ⟨ó⟩ as [au:] and short ⟨ó⟩ as [ɔ] compared to

3358-411: The kinship with the Icelandic written language. The actual pronunciation, however, often differs considerably from the written rendering. The letter ð , for example, has no specific phoneme attached to it. Jakob Jakobsen devised a rival system of orthography, based on his wish for a phonetic spelling, but this system was never taken up by the speakers. In 1908, Scripture Gift Mission published

3431-424: The language as a token of Danish identity, and the language experienced a strong surge in use and popularity, with major works of literature produced in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, traditional Danish dialects have all but disappeared, though regional variants of the standard language exist. The main differences in language are between generations, with youth language being particularly innovative. Danish has

3504-487: The language of administration and education. The islanders continued to use the language in ballads , folktales , and everyday life. This maintained a rich spoken tradition , but for 300 years the language was not used in written form. In 1823, the Danish Bible Society published a diglot of the Gospel of Matthew , with Faroese on the left and Danish on the right. Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb and

3577-547: The language of the courts. Since 1997, public authorities have been obliged to follow the official spelling system laid out in the Orthography Law. In the 21st century, discussions have been held with a view to create a law that would make Danish the official language of Denmark. In addition, a noticeable community of Danish speakers is in Southern Schleswig , the portion of Germany bordering Denmark, and

3650-410: The little boy "pees" into the basin. From 1857 to 1940, these holes were sealed, out of deference to the sensibilities of the time. The Caritas Well is a result of a relocation and modernization of an older fountain erected by Frederik II . He provided for the construction of a six km water tube from Lake Emdrup north of the city to Gammel Torv. The altitude difference being 9 metres, the water pressure

3723-407: The major varieties of Standard Danish are High Copenhagen Standard, associated with elderly, well to-do, and well educated people of the capital, and low Copenhagen speech traditionally associated with the working class, but today adopted as the prestige variety of the younger generations. Also, in the 21st century, the influence of immigration has had linguistic consequences, such as the emergence of

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3796-422: The mid-20th century. Moders navn er vort Hjertesprog, kun løs er al fremmed Tale. Det alene i mund og bog, kan vække et folk af dvale. "Mother's name is our hearts' tongue, only idle is all foreign speech It alone, in mouth or in book, can rouse a people from sleep." N.F.S. Grundtvig , "Modersmaalet" Following the loss of Schleswig to Germany, a sharp influx of German speakers moved into

3869-551: The palatalisation é and ǽ merged as /ɛː/ and approximately in the same period epenthetic u is inserted into word-final /Cr/ and /CrC/ clusters. A massive quantity shift also operated in Middle Faroese. In the case of skerping , it took place after delabialization but before loss of post-vocalic ð and g /ɣ/ . The shift of hv /hw/ to /kw/ , the deletion of /h/ in (remaining) word-initial /h/ –sonorant clusters ( hr , hl , hn > r , l , n ), and

3942-510: The settlers were not from Scandinavia , but descendants of Norse settlers in the Irish Sea region. In addition, women from Norse Ireland, Orkney , or Shetland often married native Scandinavian men before settling in the Faroe Islands and Iceland. As a result, the Irish language has had some influence on both Faroese and Icelandic . There is speculation about Irish language place names in

4015-472: The shared written standard language remained). With the introduction of absolutism in 1660, the Danish state was further integrated, and the language of the Danish chancellery, a Zealandic variety with German and French influence, became the de facto official standard language , especially in writing—this was the original so-called rigsdansk ("Danish of the Realm"). Also, beginning in the mid-18th century,

4088-486: The three languages can often understand the others fairly well, though studies have shown that the mutual intelligibility is asymmetric: Norwegian speakers generally understand both Danish and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand each other. Concomitantly, Swedes and Danes understand Norwegian better than they understand each other's languages. Norwegian occupies the middle position in terms of intelligibility because of its shared border with Sweden, resulting in

4161-519: The tourist board Visit Faroe Islands launched a website entitled Faroe Islands Translate. Text can be entered in thirteen languages, including English, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Instead of an instant machine translation being given, the text goes to a volunteer who will provide a live video translation, or else a recorded one later. The aim of this project was to get Faroese featured on Google Translate . Old Faroese ( miðaldarføroyskt , ca. mid-14th to mid-16th centuries)

4234-445: The turn of the 20th century. Danish itself can be divided into three main dialect areas: Jutlandic (West Danish), Insular Danish (including the standard variety), and East Danish (including Bornholmian and Scanian ). According to the view that Scandinavian is a dialect continuum, East Danish can be considered intermediary between Danish and Swedish, while Scanian can be considered a Swedified East Danish dialect, and Bornholmian

4307-429: The use of dialectal speech is widely encouraged. The study of Faroese dialectology began hundreds of years ago, with the scholar Lucas Debes noting a north–south distinction as early as 1673. In the 18th century linguist Jens Christian Svabo made further distinctions, such as identifying the Tórshavn dialect, though his categorization lacked thorough justification. In 1891 Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb would write

4380-411: The vernacular language to be accessible also to those who were not Latinate. The Jutlandic Law and Scanian Law were written in vernacular Danish in the early 13th century. Beginning in 1350, Danish began to be used as a language of administration, and new types of literature began to be written in the language, such as royal letters and testaments. The orthography in this period was not standardized nor

4453-469: The vernacular, such as the plural form of verbs, should be conserved in writing (i.e. han er "he is" vs. de ere "they are"). The East Danish provinces were lost to Sweden after the Second Treaty of Brömsebro (1645) after which they were gradually Swedified; just as Norway was politically severed from Denmark, beginning also a gradual end of Danish influence on Norwegian (influence through

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4526-516: The whore-bed with another man's wife and he comes away alive..." Jutlandic Law, 1241 In the medieval period, Danish emerged as a separate language from Swedish. The main written language was Latin, and the few Danish-language texts preserved from this period are written in the Latin alphabet, although the runic alphabet seems to have lingered in popular usage in some areas. The main text types written in this period are laws, which were formulated in

4599-492: The word by , meaning ‘village’ or ‘town’, occurs in many English place-names, such as Whitby and Selby , as remnants of the Viking occupation . During that period English adopted ‘are’, the third person plural form of the verb ‘to be’, as well as the personal pronouns ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’ from contemporary Old Norse. Danish is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Swedish . A proficient speaker of any of

4672-489: The written languages are compatible, spoken Danish is distinctly different from Norwegian and Swedish and thus the degree of mutual intelligibility with either is variable between regions and speakers . Until the 16th century, Danish was a continuum of dialects spoken from Southern Jutland and Schleswig to Scania with no standard variety or spelling conventions. With the Protestant Reformation and

4745-446: The written languages resemble each other quite closely, largely owing to Faroese's etymological orthography . East Germanic languages West Germanic languages Icelandic Faroese Norwegian Danish Swedish Around 900 AD, the language spoken in the Faroes was Old Norse , which Norse settlers had brought with them during the time of the settlement of Faroe Islands ( landnám ) that began in 825. However, many of

4818-492: Was a territory ruled by Denmark–Norway , one of whose official languages was Danish. Though Danish ceased to be an official language in Iceland in 1944, it is still widely used and is a mandatory subject in school, taught as a second foreign language after English. No law stipulates an official language for Denmark, making Danish the de facto official language only. The Code of Civil Procedure does, however, lay down Danish as

4891-769: Was adequate for a fountain to be constructed. Though ornamental in character, the well was also part of the city's water supply system. On the monarch's birthday (currently 16 April for Queen Margrethe II ), copper balls covered in 24 carat gold, symbolising golden apples, are placed in the fountain, to balance on the streams. The tradition goes back to the 18th century. 55°40′41″N 12°34′20″E  /  55.6781°N 12.5723°E  / 55.6781; 12.5723 Danish language Nordic Council Danish ( / ˈ d eɪ n ɪ ʃ / , DAY -nish ; endonym : dansk pronounced [ˈtænˀsk] , dansk sprog [ˈtænˀsk ˈspʁɔwˀ] )

4964-457: Was also one of two official languages of Greenland (alongside Greenlandic ). Danish now acts as a lingua franca in Greenland, with a large percentage of native Greenlanders able to speak Danish as a second language (it was introduced into the education system as a compulsory language in 1928). About 10% of the population speaks Danish as their first language , due to immigration. Iceland

5037-488: Was mostly supplanted by the Low German spise . As well as loanwords, new words can be freely formed by compounding existing words. In standard texts of contemporary Danish, Middle Low German loans account for about 16–17% of the vocabulary, Graeco-Latin loans 4–8%, French 2–4% and English about 1%. Danish and English are both Germanic languages. Danish is a North Germanic language descended from Old Norse, and English

5110-627: Was once the Viking settlement of Jorvik. Several other English words derive from Old East Norse, for example "knife" ( kniv ), "husband" ( husbond ), and "egg" ( æg ). The suffix "-by" for 'town' is common in place names in Yorkshire and the east Midlands, for example Selby, Whitby, Derby, and Grimsby. The word "dale" meaning valley is common in Yorkshire and Derbyshire placenames. Fangær man saar i hor seng mæth annæns mansz kunæ. oc kumær han burt liuænd... . "If one catches someone in

5183-463: Was still not standardized and the principles for doing so were vigorously discussed among Danish philologists. The grammar of Jens Pedersen Høysgaard was the first to give a detailed analysis of Danish phonology and prosody, including a description of the stød . In this period, scholars were also discussing whether it was best to "write as one speaks" or to "speak as one writes", including whether archaic grammatical forms that had fallen out of use in

5256-469: Was the change of the diphthong æi (Old West Norse ei ) to the monophthong e , as in stæin to sten . This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read stain and the later stin . Also, a change of au as in dauðr into ø as in døðr occurred. This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from tauþr into tuþr . Moreover, the øy (Old West Norse ey ) diphthong changed into ø , as well, as in

5329-474: Was the spoken language, and the regional laws demonstrate the dialectal differences between the regions in which they were written. Throughout this period, Danish was in contact with Low German , and many Low German loan words were introduced in this period. With the Protestant Reformation in 1536, Danish also became the language of religion, which sparked a new interest in using Danish as

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