Danish
orthography is the system and norms used for writing the
Danish language, including spelling and punctuation.
Officially, the norms are set by the
Danish language council through the publication of
Retskrivningsordbogen.
Danish currently uses a 29-letter
Latin-script alphabet
A Latin-script alphabet (Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet) is an alphabet that uses letters of the Latin script. The 21-letter archaic Latin alphabet and the 23-letter classical Latin alphabet belong to the oldest of this group. The 26-lette ...
, identical to the
Norwegian alphabet, with an additional three letters: ''
Æ'', ''
Ø'' and ''
Å''.
History
There were
spelling reforms in 1872, 1889 (with some changes in 1892), and 1948. These spelling reforms were based in the decisions of the Nordic spelling conference of 1869, whose goal was to abolish spellings that are justified by neither
phonetics nor
etymology and to bring Danish and
Swedish orthographies closer.
The reform of 1872 replaced the letter by in some words (> , > , > ; however, for words with the change was reverted in 1889), abolished the distinction of the homophonous words ''Thing'' and ''Ting'' (however, the distinction between and was retained), replaced the letter by (''Qvinde''>''Kvinde''), deleted the silent after vowels (''faae''>''faa''), abolished doubling of vowels to signify vowel length (''Steen''>''Sten''), replaced by after vowels (''Vei''>''Vej''), and introduced some smaller spelling changes. In some cases, spelling of loanwords was simplified, but in general the question of spelling loanwords was largely left undecided.
In 1889, was abolished from native words and most loanwords: ''Oxe''>''Okse'', ''Exempel''>''Eksempel''. The letter was deleted from the combinations ''gje, gjæ, gjø, kje, kjæ, kjø'': ''Kjøkken''>''Køkken''. Additionally, spelling of loanwords was standardized. In some cases, simplified spellings were adopted ( sounded mostly becomes ; in words of Greek origin are replaced by ), but in many cases original spellings were retained.
Danish formerly used both (in
Fraktur
Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. The blackletter lines are broken up; that is, their forms contain many angles when compared to the curves of the Antiq ...
) and (in
Antiqua), though it was suggested to use for /ø/ and for /œ/, which was also sometimes employed.
[N. M. Petersen: ''Dänische Sprachlehre für Deutsche'' (i.e. Danish Grammar for Germans), Kopenhagen, 1830, p. 1–3]
at books.google
The distinction between and was optionally allowed in 1872, recommended in 1889, but rejected in 1892, although the
orthographic dictionaries continued to use and (collated as if they were the same letter) until 1918 and the book ''
Folkehöjskolens Sangbog'' continued to use and in its editions as late as 1962.
Earlier instead of , or a
ligature
Ligature may refer to:
* Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure
** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry
* Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...
of two was also used.
[N. M. Petersen: ''Dänische Sprachlehre für Deutsche'' (i.e. Danish Grammar for Germans), Kopenhagen, 1830, p. 1–3]
at books.google
In 1948 was re-introduced or officially introduced in Danish, replacing . The letter then came from the
Swedish alphabet, where it has been in official use since the 18th century. The initial proposal was to place first in the Danish alphabet, before . Its place as the last letter of the alphabet, as in Norwegian, was decided in 1955. The former
digraph still occurs in personal names and in Danish geographical names. However, in geographical names, is allowed as an alternative spelling: ''
Aabenraa
Aabenraa (; , ; Sønderjysk: ''Affenråe'') is a town in Southern Denmark, at the head of the Aabenraa Fjord, an arm of the Little Belt, north of the Denmark–Germany border and north of German town of Flensburg. It was the seat of Sønder ...
'' or ''Åbenrå'', ''
Aalborg
Aalborg (, , ) is Denmark's List of cities in Denmark by population, fourth largest town (behind Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Odense) with a population of 119,862 (1 July 2022) in the town proper and an Urban area, urban population of 143,598 (1 July ...
'' or ''Ålborg'', ''
Aarhus
Aarhus (, , ; officially spelled Århus from 1948 until 1 January 2011) is the second-largest city in Denmark and the seat of Aarhus Municipality. It is located on the eastern shore of Jutland in the Kattegat sea and approximately northwes ...
'' or ''Århus''. remains in use as a transliteration, if the letter is not available for technical reasons. is treated like in
alphabetical sorting, not like two adjacent , meaning that while is the first letter of the alphabet, is the last.
All nouns in Danish used to be capitalized, as in German. The reform of 1948 abolished the capitalization of all nouns.
Alphabet
The
Danish alphabet is based upon the
Latin alphabet and has consisted of the following 29
letter
Letter, letters, or literature may refer to:
Characters typeface
* Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet.
* Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...
s since 1980 when was separated from .
* , and are often transcribed with , and even though the first set is voiceless, the second one is
aspirated and the rhotic is
uvular
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not pr ...
, not
alveolar.
* In monomorphematic words, vowels are usually short before two or more consonants + .
* Vowels are usually long before a single consonant + .
* In two consecutive vowels the stressed vowel is always long and the unstressed is always short.
The letters are not used in the spelling of native words. Therefore, the phonemic interpretation of letters in
loanwords depends on the donating language. However, Danish tends to preserve the original spelling of loanwords. In particular, a that represents is almost never transliterated to in Danish, as would most often happen in Norwegian. Many words originally derived from
Latin roots retain in their Danish spelling, for example Norwegian vs Danish . However, the letter representing is mostly normalized to . The letter is used in a few loanwords like (from English), but is normally replaced by in words from Latin (e.g. ) and by in words from French (e.g. ). is normally replaced by in words from Latin, Greek, or French, e.g. ; but is retained: 1) at the beginning of words of Greek origin, where it sounds , e.g. ; 2) before in words of Latin origin, e.g. ; 3) in chemical terms, e.g. ; 4) in loanwords from English, e.g. ; 5) at the end of French loanwords, where it is silent, e.g. . The verb , derived from the name of the letter itself, can be spelled either way. The letter is also used instead of ''eks-'' in abbreviations: , also written .
The "foreign" letters also sometimes appear in the spelling of otherwise-indigenous family names. For example, many of the Danish families that use the surname ''Skov'' (literally: "Woods") spell it ''Schou''. Also has been restored in some geographical names: ''
Nexø
Nexø, sometimes spelled Neksø ( sv, Nexö), is a town on the east coast of the Baltic island of Bornholm, Denmark. With a population of 3,668 (as of 1 January 2022), it is the second largest town, as well as the largest fishing port on the i ...
'', ''
Gladsaxe
Gladsaxe Kommune is a municipality (Danish, '' kommune'') near Copenhagen in Region Hovedstaden on the island of Zealand (''Sjælland'') in eastern Denmark. The municipality covers an area of , and has a total population of 69,681 (2019). Its ma ...
'', ''
Faxe
Faxe or Fakse is a town on the island of Zealand in eastern Denmark. It is located in Faxe Municipality in Region Zealand. The town is most known for the Faxe Brewery, Royal Unibrew, a relatively large brewery producing a range of beer and soft ...
''.
The difference between the Dano-Norwegian and the
Swedish alphabet is that Swedish uses. instead of , and instead of — similar to
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
. Also, the
collating order for these three letters is different: Å, Ä, Ö.
In current Danish, is recognized as a separate letter from . The transition was made in 1980; before that, was considered to be a variation of and words using it were alphabetized accordingly (e.g.: "Wales, Vallø, Washington, Wedellsborg, Vendsyssel"). The Danish version of the
alphabet song
The alphabet song is any of various songs used to teach children an alphabet. Alphabet songs typically recite the names of all letters of the alphabet of a given language in order.
The ABC (Verse 1)
"The ABC Song", otherwise referred to as ...
still states that the alphabet has 28 letters; the last line reads , i.e. "that makes twenty-eight". However, today the letter is considered an official letter.
Diacritics
Standard Danish orthography has no compulsory
diacritics, but allows the use of an
acute accent
The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed cha ...
for disambiguation. Most often, an accent on marks a stressed syllable in one of a pair of
homographs that have different stresses, for example (a boy) versus (one boy). It can also be part of the official spelling such as in (avenue) or (idea).
Less often, any vowel except may be accented to indicate stress on a ''word'', either to clarify the meaning of the sentence, or to ease the reading otherwise. For example: ("I was standing"), versus ("I got out of bed"); ("the dog does (it)"), versus ("the dog barks"). Most often, however, such distinctions are made using typographical emphasis (italics, underlining) or simply left to the reader to infer from the context, and the use of accents in such cases may appear dated. A common context in which the explicit acute accent is preferred is to disambiguate (''a'',
indefinite article) and (''one'',
numeral) in central places in official written materials such as advertising, where clarity is important.
Computing standards
In
computing, several different coding standards have existed for this alphabet:
*
DS 2089, later established in international standard
ISO 646
*
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...
code page
In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some ...
865
*
ISO 8859-1
*
Unicode
See also
*
Comparison of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish#Writing_system
*
Comparison of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish#Pronunciation and sound system
*
Danish braille
*
Danish phonology
*
Icelandic orthography
Icelandic orthography is the way in which Icelandic words are spelled and how their spelling corresponds with their pronunciation.
Alphabet
The Icelandic alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet including some letters duplicated with acute accents ...
*
Futhark
Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialis ...
, the Germanic runes used formerly
*
Spelling alphabets
A spelling alphabet ( also called by various other names) is a set of words used to represent the letters of an alphabet in oral communication, especially over a two-way radio or telephone. The words chosen to represent the letters sound sufficien ...
*
Swedish alphabet
References
External links
Type Danish characters online1889 spelling reform (in Danish)1948 spelling reform (in Danish)Current orthographic rules (in Danish)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Danish Orthography
Orthography
Indo-European Latin-script orthographies