Danish (
dansk&_160;
(help·info);
IPA&_160;
[d?ænsg°]) is one of the
North Germanic languages (also called
Scandinavian languages), a sub-group of the
Germanic branch of the
Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in
Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of
Schleswig-Holstein in
Germany where it holds the status of minority language
[1] . Danish also holds official status and is a mandatory subject in school in the Danish territories of
Greenland and the
Faroe Islands, which now enjoy limited autonomy. In
Iceland and the
Faroe Islands, Danish is taught as a compulsory foreign language in schools. There are also Danish language communities in
Argentina, the
U.S. and
Canada.
Danish, together with Swedish, derives from the East Norse dialect group, while Norwegian is classified as a West Norse language together with Faroese and Icelandic. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Danish, Norwegian and Swedish into a Mainland Scandianvian group while Icelandic and Faroese are placed in a separate category labeled Insular Scandinavian.
Written Danish and Norwegian Bokmål are particularly close, though the phonology (that is, the system of relationships among the speech sounds that constitute the fundamental components of the language) and the prosody (the patterns of stress and intonation) differ somewhat. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can understand the others, though studies have shown that speakers of Norwegian generally understand both Danish and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand each other. Both Swedes and Danes also understand Norwegian better than they understand each other's languages.[2]
In the 8th century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, Proto-Norse, had undergone some changes and evolved into Old Norse. This language began to undergo new changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, which resulted in the appearance of two similar dialects, Old West Norse (Norway and Iceland) and Old East Norse (Denmark and Sweden).
