The history of the Danish language

The Danish language’s origin is Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. Around the year 1000 the Norse of Denmark and Sweden drifted away from the Norse of Norway and Iceland, and over the next thousand years it became the Danish you hear today: softer, shorter and full of German and English words. Here is the story in five steps, with words you can hear.

Where does the Danish language come from?

Danish is a North Germanic language, like Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese. Its family tree goes back to a language spoken all over Scandinavia: first Proto-Norse, then, in the Viking Age, Old Norse. Old Norse split into a western branch (Norway, Iceland) and an eastern branch (Denmark, Sweden). Danish grew out of the eastern one, Old East Norse, which is why Danish and Swedish are so close.

Many of the changes that separated east from west started in Denmark. One example: Old Norse steinn, stone, became stēn in the east. In modern Danish it is sten, while Norwegian still says stein.

A timeline of Danish

The periods in the table are the ones Danish language historians usually use. The borders are not sharp: nobody woke up one morning in 1100 speaking a new language.

Old Danish: runes and the Viking Age

The oldest Danish we can read is carved in stone. In the Viking Age, Danes wrote with the younger runes, an alphabet of only 16 signs, so one rune had to stand for several sounds. The most famous stones are at Jelling in Jutland, raised by the kings Gorm and Harald Bluetooth in the 900s. Harald’s stone is often called Denmark’s birth certificate, because the name of the country is carved on it.

A small warning if you search for “old danish”: you will also find Gammel Dansk, a bitter drink Danes have with breakfast on birthdays. That one is not very old.

How Old Norse words became Danish

The biggest change in Danish happened in the Middle Ages: the hard sounds after a vowel got soft. A Viking said p, t, k where a modern Dane says b, d, g, and those soft sounds kept softening until some of them almost disappeared.

Listen to dag: the g is gone in speech, and the word sounds like “da”. This is the reason Danish is written one way and spoken another. The spelling stopped moving centuries ago; the sounds did not. The pronunciation guide takes you through the rules that came out of it.

German, French and English words in Danish

In the late Middle Ages the Hanseatic towns of northern Germany ran the trade in the Baltic, and Low German words came into Danish by the hundred. Many of the most common little words are German: arbejde (work), betale (to pay), begynde (to begin) and blive (to become). Later came French words, often spelled the Danish way, like kusine (cousin) and kontor (office).

English got a lot from the Vikings too. Words like “egg”, “knife”, “sky”, “window” and “they” are Norse: compare Danish æg and kniv. Danish vindue and English “window” both come from an old “wind eye”. Today the traffic goes the other way: young Danes use English words every day, and you will hear weekend and nice in the middle of Danish sentences.

Do the Danes have their own language?

Yes. Danish is the official language of Denmark, and it is also used in the Faroe Islands and Greenland next to Faroese and Greenlandic, and by the Danish minority in South Schleswig in Germany. The guide to where Danish is spoken has the details. Danish is its own language with its own spelling and its own dictionary, even if a Norwegian can read most of it.

Can Nordic countries understand each other?

Partly, and more on paper than in speech. Danish and Norwegian look almost the same when they are written, because Norway used Danish as its written language for centuries. Spoken, it is another matter: Danish swallows its consonants, and Swedes and Norwegians often say Danish is the hardest of the three to understand. Most Danes find Norwegian easier to follow than Swedish. Icelandic and Faroese are a different story; they stayed close to Old Norse, and Danes cannot follow them without learning them.

If you are curious about the neighbours further south, see Danish vs Dutch.

Questions people ask

Is Danish older than Swedish?

No. They are sisters, not mother and daughter. Both grew out of Old East Norse, and for a long time the difference between “Danish” and “Swedish” was more about the border than about the language.

Did the Vikings speak Danish?

They spoke Old Norse. A Viking from Denmark spoke a version of it that later became Danish, but you would not understand him, and he would not understand hvordan har du det?

Why does Danish sound so different from Swedish?

Because the sounds changed much more in Danish: the soft d, the swallowed g, the stød, the many vowels. Swedish kept more of the hard consonants. The spelling of the two languages is still quite close.

What are the languages spoken in Northern Europe?

In the Nordic countries: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese, which are all Norse languages, plus Finnish, the Sami languages and Greenlandic, which belong to other families.