Danish · Dansk

About Danish

Language family

Indo-European, North Germanic

Where it's spoken

Denmark

Speakers

roughly 6 million speakers

Danish, like Norwegian and Swedish, descends from Old Norse and remains close enough to both that Scandinavians can often read each other's languages without much difficulty, even though spoken Danish's soft, swallowed consonants make listening comprehension harder across the group. Denmark's centuries as a regional power left Danish loanwords and administrative influence across Norway (which used written Danish for its own standard until the 19th century) and Iceland. Danish dropped the pitch-accent distinctions its Scandinavian cousins kept, developing a distinctive glottal 'stød' instead.