Danish
Danish is one of the North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages), a sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany where it holds the status of minority language. Danish also holds official status and is a mandatory subject in school in the Danish territory of the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Danish was formerly a mandatory subject in schools in Iceland. There are also Danish language communities in Argentina, the U.S. and Canada.
Danish, together with Swedish, derives from the East Norse dialect group, while Norwegian is classified as a West Norse language together with Faroese and Icelandic. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Danish, Norwegian and Swedish into a Mainland Scandinavian group while Icelandic and Faroese are placed in a separate category labeled Insular Scandinavian.
Written Danish and Norwegian Bokmål are particularly close, though the phonology (that is, the system of relationships among the speech sounds that constitute the fundamental components of the language) and the prosody (the patterns of stress and intonation) differ somewhat. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can understand the others, though studies have shown that speakers of Norwegian generally understand both Danish and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand each other. Both Swedes and Danes also understand Norwegian better than they understand each other's languages.
The sound system of Danish is in many ways unique among the world's languages. It is quite prone to considerable reduction and assimilation of both consonants and vowels even in very formal standard language. A rare feature is the presence of a prosodic feature called stød in Danish (lit. "push; thrust"). This is a form of laryngealization or creaky voice, only occasionally realized as a full glottal stop (especially in emphatic pronunciation). It can be the only distinguishing feature between certain words, thus creating minimal pairs (e.g. bønder "peasants" with stød vs. bønner "beans" or "prayers" without). The distribution of stød in the lexicon is clearly related to the distribution of the common Scandinavian tonal word accents found in most dialects of Norwegian and Swedish, including the national standard languages. Most linguists today believe that stød is a development of the word accents, rather than the other way round.[citation needed] Some have theorized it emerged from the overwhelming influence of Low German in medieval times, having flattened the originally Nordic melodic accent, but stød is absent in most southern Danish dialects where Low German impact would have been the greatest. Stød generally occurs in words that have "accent 1" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were monosyllabic in Old Norse, while no-stød occurs in words that have "accent 2" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were polysyllabic in Old Norse.
Unlike the neighboring Continental Scandinavian languages, the prosody of Danish does not have phonemic pitch. Stress is phonemic and distinguishes words such as billigst ['bilist] "cheapest" and bilist [bi'list] "car driver".
The infinitive forms of Danish verbs end in a vowel, which in almost all cases is the letter e. Verbs are conjugated according to tense, but otherwise do not vary according to person or number. For example the present tense form of the Danish infinitive verb spise ("to eat") is spiser; this form is the same regardless of whether the subject is in the first, second, or third person, or whether it is singular or plural. This extreme ease of conjugating verbs is compensated by the large number of irregular verbs in the language.
Like most Germanic languages, Danish joins compound nouns. The example kvindehåndboldlandsholdet, "the female handball national team", illustrates that it does so to a significantly higher degree than English. In some cases, nouns are joined with an extra s, like landsmand (from land, "country", and mand, "man", meaning "compatriot"), but landmand (from same roots, meaning "farmer"). Some words are joined with an extra e, like gæstebog (from gæst and bog, meaning "guest book").
Danish words are largely derived from the Old Norse language, with new words formed by compounding. A large percentage of Danish words, however, hail from Middle Low German (for example, betale = to pay, måske = maybe). Later on, standard German and French and now English have superseded Low German influence — although many old Nordic words remain, they fall out of favor when the new come in, such as can be seen with æde (to eat) which became less common when the Low German spise came into fashion. Because English and Danish are related languages, many common words are very similar in the two languages. For example, the following Danish words are easily recognizable in their written form to English speakers: have, over, under, for, give, flag, salt, kat. When pronounced, these words sound quite different from their English equivalents, due to the Great Vowel Shift of English. In addition, the word by, meaning "village" or "town", occurs in several English placenames, such as Whitby and Selby, as remnants of the Viking occupation. A lot of Danish words are directly derived from English, such as harddisk or skateboard.
Everyday Conversation
"Danish": dansk
"Hello": hej
"Goodbye": farvel
"Be so kind": Vær så venlig
"Thanks": tak
"This": denne
"How much?": hvor meget?\ Hvad koster det?
"English": engelsk
"Yes": ja
"No": nej
"May I take your picture?": Må jeg tage et billede af dig?
"Where is the toilet?": Hvor er toilettet?
"Where are you from?": Hvor kommer du fra?
"Can you speak English?": Taler du engelsk?
"Cheers": Skål
"Good morning!"： God morgen！
"Sorry!"： Undskyld！
"What’s your name?"： Hvad hedder du?
"My name is…": Jeg hedder ....
"How are you?": Hvordan går det？
"Fine,thanks" Det går godt.
"Just so so" Det går ikke så godt.
"How about you?" Hvad med dig?
"Can I help you?" Kan jeg hjælpe dig？
