DANISH LANGUAGE

Danish Dansk the official language of Denmark, spoken there by more than 5 million people. Danish belongs to the East Scandinavian branch of North Germanic languages. It began to separate from the other Scandinavian languages, to which it is closely related, about AD 1000. The oldest Danish records are runic inscriptions (c. AD 250800) found from Jutland to southern Sweden; the earliest manuscripts in Danish date from the 13th century. Danish is clearly the Scandinavian language that has undergone the greatest amount of change away from Old Scandinavian. During the Middle Ages it lost the old case system, merged the masculine and feminine genders into one common gender, and acquired many Low German words, prefixes, and suffixes from contact with the traders of the Hanseatic League. Modern Danish has only two cases (nominative and genitive) and two genders (common and neuter). The most outstanding feature of its sound system is the glottal stop (std), derived from what was originally a tonal accent. Evidence of Denmark's political power and influence can be seen in the stamp of the Danish language on the Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic languages.