Native Name: Dansk

Official Language: Denmark and Faroes Islands (with Faroese) and Greenland (with Greenlandic)

Background
It belongs to the Indo-European family, Germanic group, Scandinavian subgroup. Danish is spoken by the 5 million inhabitants of Denmark, and is also the official language of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, which are considered part of Denmark. Danish is most closely related to Norwegian and Swedish. During the centuries that Denmark and Norway were one country, a dialect closer to Danish than Norwegian was spoken in the Norwegian cities. This is still in use today and is sometimes referred to as “Dano-Norwegian.” The Danish alphabet is the same as the Norwegian, consisting of the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet plus “æ”, “ø”, and “å” at the end. Before 1948 the “å” was written “aa”. The spelling reform of that year also abolished the German practice of beginning all nouns with a capital letter.

Reprinted from www.unhchr.ch/udhr