Languages of Denmark

Languages of
country = Denmark
official = Danish (>90%)
minority = (Officially recognised)
German
Faroese
Greenlandic

foreign = English (86%)
German (58%)
French (12%)
sign = Danish Sign Language
keyboard = Danish QWERTY
keyboard

source = [http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_243_en.pdf ebs_243_en.pdf] (europa.eu)

The Kingdom of Denmark has only one official language, Danish, the national language of the Danish people, but there are several minority languages spoken through the territory. These include German, Faroese, and Greenlandic. A large majority of Danes also speak English as a second language.

Official Minority languages

German

German is an official minority language in South Jutland County (in Region Syddanmark), which was part of Imperial Germany prior the Treaty of Versailles. Between 15,000 and 20,000 Ethnic Germans live in South Jutland, of whom roughly 8,000 use either the standard German or the Schleswigsch variety of Low Saxon in daily communications. Shleswigisch is highly divergent from Standard German and can be quite difficult to understand by Standard German speakers. Outside of South Jutland, the members of St. Peter's Church in Copenhagen use German in their Church, its website, and the school that it runs. [http://www.sankt-petri.dk/]

Faroese

Faroese, a North Germanic language like Danish, is the primary language of the Faroe Islands, a self-governing territory of the Kingdom. It is also spoken by some Faroese immigrants to mainland Denmark.

Greenlandic

Greenlandic is the main language of the 54,000 Inuit living in Greenland, which is, like the Faroes, a self-governing territory of Denmark. Roughly 7,000 people speak Greenlandic on the Danish mainland.

Unofficial languages

Bornholmsk

The dialect of Bornholmsk is spoken on the island of Bornholm. It shares many features with Swedish, and can be considered a sub-dialect of the Scanian language.

Norwegian and Swedish

The Norwegian, a Scandinavian language of Norway is spoken by a small percentage and understood by many Danes, same applies to the Swedish language of the neighboring country of Sweden.

Frisian

The Frisian language, a Low Germanic relative of the Dutch language is spoken by a few thousand persons in South Jutland County. Fact|date=August 2008 The dialect is called North Frisian in the historic range of northern Friesland but is not a co-official language. North Frisian is an endangered language, as in most places children no longer learn it. Fact|date=August 2008

References

* [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=DK Ethnologue report for Denmark]
* [http://www.uoc.es/euromosaic/web/document/alemany/an/i2/i2.html German in Denmark]