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.
