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. It is one of the Scandinavian languages, which
constitute a branch of the Germanic languages, in turn a part of
the Indo-European family.
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.