Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland,[5] the Faroe Islands, and the northern German region of Southern Schleswig, where it has minority language status.

[6][7] Minor Danish-speaking communities are also found in Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina.

Although the written languages are compatible, spoken Danish is distinctly different from Norwegian and Swedish and thus the degree of mutual intelligibility with either is variable between regions and speakers.

Until the 16th century, Danish was a continuum of dialects spoken from Southern Jutland and Schleswig to Scania with no standard variety or spelling conventions.

With the Protestant Reformation and the introduction of the printing press, a standard language was developed which was based on the educated dialect of Copenhagen and Malmö.

[9] It spread through use in the education system and administration, though German and Latin continued to be the most important written languages well into the 17th century.

Although many old Nordic words remain, some were replaced with borrowed synonyms, for example æde (to eat) was mostly supplanted by the Low German spise.

For example, when written, commonly used Danish verbs, nouns, and prepositions such as have, over, under, for, give, flag, salt, and arm are easily recognizable to English speakers.

In addition, the word by, meaning ‘village’ or ‘town’, occurs in many English place-names, such as Whitby and Selby, as remnants of the Viking occupation.

Several other English words derive from Old East Norse, for example "knife" (kniv), "husband" (husbond), and "egg" (æg).

The suffix "-by" for 'town' is common in place names in Yorkshire and the east Midlands, for example Selby, Whitby, Derby, and Grimsby.

oc kumær han burt liuænd.... "If one catches someone in the whore-bed with another man's wife and he comes away alive..." In the medieval period, Danish emerged as a separate language from Swedish.

Also in this period, Danish began to take on the linguistic traits that differentiate it from Swedish and Norwegian, such as the stød, the voicing of many stop consonants, and the weakening of many final vowels to /e/.

Major authors from this period are Thomas Kingo, poet and psalmist, and Leonora Christina Ulfeldt, whose novel Jammersminde (Remembered Woes) is considered a literary masterpiece by scholars.

The grammar of Jens Pedersen Høysgaard was the first to give a detailed analysis of Danish phonology and prosody, including a description of the stød.

Also, beginning in the mid-18th century, the skarre-R, the uvular R sound ([ʁ]), began spreading through Denmark, likely through influence from Parisian French and German.

"Mother's name is our hearts' tongue, only idle is all foreign speech It alone, in mouth or in book, can rouse a people from sleep."

The political loss of territory sparked a period of intense nationalism in Denmark, coinciding with the so-called "Golden Age" of Danish culture.

Throughout the 19th century, Danes emigrated, establishing small expatriate communities in the Americas, particularly in the United States, Canada, and Argentina, where memory and some use of Danish remains today.

[37] After the occupation of Denmark by Germany in World War II, the 1948 orthography reform dropped the German-influenced rule of capitalizing nouns, and introduced the letter ⟨å⟩.

Three 20th-century Danish authors have become Nobel Prize laureates in Literature: Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan (joint recipients in 1917) and Johannes V. Jensen (awarded 1944).

More than 25% of all Danish speakers live in the metropolitan area of the capital, and most government agencies, institutions, and major businesses keep their main offices in Copenhagen, which has resulted in a very homogeneous national speech norm.

Questions of analysis may give a slightly different inventory, for example based on whether r-colored vowels are considered distinct phonemes.

Danish [ð] differs from the English sound that is conventionally transcribed with the same IPA symbol, in that it is not a dental fricative but an alveolar approximant which is frequently heard as [l] by second language learners.

Some sources have described it as a glottal stop, but this is a very infrequent realization, and today phoneticians consider it a phonation type or a prosodic phenomenon.

[74] Similarly to the case of English, modern Danish grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-European dependent-marking pattern with a rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order, to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection, a fairly fixed SVO word order and a complex syntax.

Danish distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, numerals, adjectives, adverbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections and onomatopoeia.

A distinctive feature of the Nordic languages, including Danish, is that the definite articles, which also mark noun gender, have developed into suffixes.

For example, the phrases kongen af Danmarks bolsjefabrik "the king of Denmark's candy factory", where the factory is owned by the king of Denmark, or det er pigen Uffe bor sammen meds datter "that is the daughter of the girl that Uffe lives with", where the enclitic attaches to a stranded preposition.

[98] Thus, the suffix -tyve should be understood as a plural of ti (10), though to modern Danes tyve means 20, making it hard to explain why fyrretyve is 40 (four tens) and not 80 (four twenties).