Denmark

Danish is spoken by about 5.1 million people in Denmark. Danish can be divided into three main dialects: Western Danish spoken in Jutland, Central Danish spoken in Sjælland, and Eastern Danish spoken in Bornholm. These three dialects are quite different from one another. Along the German border, about 20,000 Danish speak German. They have German speaking schools and a newspaper written in German.

Danish is also spoken by a small minority of Danes in Germany, south of the Danish border.

Minority groups in the Faroe Islands and in Greenland also speak Danish.

One characteristic of spoken Danish is the so-called glottal stop. It is a stress accent, which developed during the medieval ages.

Danish, together with Swedish, belongs to the East Scandinavian branch of the North German language group in the Indo-European family of languages.