Danish is not exactly known as one of the most beautiful languages in the world. Actually, the sound of Danish always seems to amuse foreigners, which gives the language a certain entertainment value. Foreigners often characterise Danish as a monotone-like drawl, and many people say that Danes speak like they have a hot potato in their mouth. Of course, the Danes themselves find their language both charming and pretty though they are aware of the fact that Danish can be difficult to learn for people from other countries. Because of that, most Danes find it amusing to test foreigners with the sentence "Rødgrød med fløde" (A Danish dessert), because they know that foreigners are unable to pronounce it. So if you ever visit Denmark you can be sure that several Danes will test you on that one. Danish is characterised as a very flat language. It is sometimes claimed that people in flat countries speak with flat accents. As to Denmark this could be true, because Denmark is indeed a very flat country with its highest point only 176 metres.

Written Danish is characterised by a very strict norm, laid down by Dansk Sprognævn in Retskrivningsordbogen (The Danish dictionary of orthography) but the spoken language may vary considerably in pronunciation. The Danish language has several dialects even though Denmark is a small country. The standard language that is called Rigsdansk originated around Copenhagen, and was originally based on the sociolect of the upper class of Copenhagen. Almost every island has its own dialect, which can be difficult to understand for Danes in other parts of the country. However, the vast majority of the population speak either standard Danish or a social variation of it.

The Danish vocabulary is not based upon an enormous amount of words but it is in principle unlimited, as new words can freely be formed by means of compounding words or deriving from already existing words, eg. "langtidsplanlægge" (created of three existing words "lang", "tid", "planlægge") means to plan long-term. Existing words are simply used to create new words and as a result of this, the largest Danish dictionaries contain more than 200,000 words. Add to this that Danish is a language that freely adopts loanwords from other languages, and the possibilities of extending Danish vocabulary become vast.

Danish is a language of the Indo-European family, and it belongs to the North Germanic group together with Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian (bokmål) and Swedish. Historically speaking, Danish is a dialect of a common Scandinavian language that is known from AD 200. Only towards AD 1200 did a split become obvious, and many Viking Age loan words in English, "law", "window", "ill", "loose", "die" etc. are Scandinavian rather than Danish. Over the centuries Danish has adopted thousands of words from foreign languages, especially from Lower German in the Middle Ages eg a word like "rigtig" (real, true) from German "richtig". Since the 17^th century a considerable number of loan words have been taken from French eg. words like "genre" and "hotel" and especially in the 20th century many English words found their way into the Danish language.

The historical changes in vocabulary were to a large extent brought about by external factors such as Christian missionaries in the Viking Age, trade links with Hanseatic merchants, immigration by north German artisans and noble families in the Middle Ages, the Lutheran Reformation in the 16^th century, lawmakers, doctors, military people immigrating to Denmark in the 17^th and 18^th centuries and since then a broad cultural contact with the modern international prestige languages. These were first German and French and from the end of the 19th century mainly English. The whole of this western European cultural milieu has constantly adopted words from the both Latin and Greek and Danish is no exception here either, take for instance a word like "duet" (from Latin "duo" meaning two). Under the same external influences, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish have in all essential aspects undergone a parallel development which means that even today the Scandinavian languages Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are mutually intelligible.

During the final decades of the 20^th century, Denmark has received many immigrants from the world’s crisis areas, and little by little the languages spoken by these immigrants have begun to influence Danish. But, in contrast to the lawmakers, doctors and literary people, who came to Denmark in the 17^th, 18^th, and19^th centuries and influenced Danish heavily, the influence of the new immigrants’ languages seems very limited although we do find loan world like "kebab" and "couscous".

Present-day standard Danish is usually said to be spoken on the Danish public service channels Radio Denmark, TV2 and other nation-wide news media such as national newspapers, and this is also the form of Danish taught in Danish schools. There are, however, many regional and social dialects in Denmark, but these dialects are primarily characterised by changes in pronunciation rather than in vocabulary and syntax.

As many foreigners will know, the differences between the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish vocabulary are not great. The languages are to a large extent mutually intelligible. Danes, Norwegians and Swedes can converse in their native tongues, though they indeed sound very different for most foreigners. However, the Danish language has changed more than any of the other Scandinavian languages. The language has been - and still is - influenced by international loan words to a greater extent than Swedish and Norwegian, and therefore the rules for the spelling have often changed.

Generally, native speakers of one of the three languages have little trouble dealing with the written versions in other languages. Especially written Danish and Norwegian can be difficult to separate, some sentences are even absolutely identical.

Even though the three languages are very alike, the populations in the three countries often focus on the differences. A very recent example of the constant changes in Danish is the influence exerted by the bridge that opened in July 2000 between Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmö in Sweden. Not only have the local radio stations launched joint broadcasts where Danish and Swedish are used on the same programmes, but also the name of the bridge has become a mixture of Danish and Swedish: "Øresundsbron", with a Danish "ø" but the Swedish conjugation of the noun in the definite form. The future will show how this development is going to affect the two languages, but it is probably beyond reasonable doubt that the two languages will approach each other in several ways within the Oresund region.

Danish is written in the Roman alphabet. The biggest difference between the English/American and the Danish alphabet is that the Danish alphabet has three additional letters — "æ", "ø" and "å" - totally 29 letters. Since 1948, the alphabet has been expanded with the Swedish and Norwegian letter "å". The letters "æ", "ø" and "å" come in this order as the last three letters of the alphabet and they are all vowels. The pronunciation can be confusing, but a good way of remembering how they should sound is: for "æ" as in "egg"; for "ø" as in "first"; for "å" as in "lord".

The "å" entered the Danish alphabet in 1948, and was meant to replace the double "a". However, the "aa" is still to be found in written Danish. "Aa" is precisely the same as "å", so don’t look for Aabenraa in the beginning of the dictionary, as you will then be searching in vain. But what is the difference between "å" and "aa" and why are towns like Aalborg and Århus often spelt both ways? Today, it is a question of spelling conventions, Aalborg insists on using the double "aa" even on road signs whereas Århus insists on using the "å".

The proper usage of "å" versus "aa" is according to Retskrivningsbogen: The letter "å" was substituted for "aa" in 1948 as the token symbol for the å sound, but it is still possible to use both in Danish personal names and places, but not in other words. Besides the "æ", "ø" and "å", the most important things worth knowing about the Danish alphabet is that the letters c, q, w, x and z are only used in loan words as for instance "check", "zoo", "weekend", and that the letters v and w are treated as being the same.