Danish (Dansk) belongs to the East Scandinavian group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken by 5.4 million people in Denmark. It is also spoken in Canada, Germany, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, USA. The total number of speakers of Danish worldwide is estimated at around 5.6 million. Danish is closely related to Norwegian and Swedish. The three languages developed from Old Norse which was spoken in the areas of Scandinavia that are now Norway, Denmark and Sweden. To this day, Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes can talk to each other without an interpreter. Despite the high degree of mutual intelligibility it would not be correct to call the three languages dialects, because Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes see these languages as standardized official languages of their respective countries with separate norms for speaking and writing.
Danish is not currently taught on the IU campus, but we do have access to archived materials. Learn more about Danish here.
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