Today’s Blog Post
We typically share a lot of food-related blog posts on Skandibaking, as we are a food blog. However, we love to share a bit of our culture with you every now and again too! In the past, we have shared a lot of posts about hygge, Scandinavian holiday traditions, and even football culture. You can find all of our blog posts about Scandinavian (mostly Danish) culture at this link here. Today, though, we wanted to venture in a slightly different direction and talk about the Danish language. I (Emma) am actually a Master’s student right now studying Translation, and I can speak various languages, so this is an area of study that I really love. Hopefully, this blog post can serve as a brief (certainly not comprehensive) introduction to the Danish language!
History of Danish
Unsurprisingly, Danish stems from the same language that Swedish comes from, called Old East Norse (a late form of Old Norse). The two languages make up the Continental Scandinavian language group (along with Norwegian), but traditionally are known as the two East Scandinavian languages. Up until the 12th century, the two countries spoke pretty much the same dialect. However, Danish really started to become its own dialect/language after this, and by the 13th century, laws were being written in Danish. According to Britannica, it is the Scandinavian language that has changed the most from Old Norse. However, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are very similar, and while it can sometimes be a challenge for native speakers to understand each other, many still do and the languages are mutually intelligible.
Fun Facts about Danish
- Danish has nine vowels, which is three more than English (y included as a vowel, of course). It has even more vowel sounds (22 or 23) and is actually one of the languages with the most vowel sounds. This can make the language incredibly challenging to learn, even for Danish children.
- Danish has a unique feature called “stød,” which in English is known as a glottal stop. This is very difficult to explain, but it is a difference in how words sound. For example, the word “mor” in Danish means mother, while the word “mord” means murder. When pronounced, “mord” is pronounced with stød, while “mor” is not; other than this slight difference, they are pronounced the same. Confuse these and a very strange mix-up could occur 😂
- Danish is spoken by around 6 million people worldwide. It is spoken mainly in Denmark, as well as in some communities in Germany near the border, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. While many people deem it a somewhat less useful language to learn, it can be used to communicate throughout Scandinavia, which actually makes it very useful!
Fun Phrases to Try Out!
Now that we’ve shared some history and facts, here are a few of our favorite idioms and phrases to say in Danish, which definitely have some funny translations to English:
“At gå agurk”
The literal translation of this phrase is, “to go cucumbers” – which is just a way in Danish of saying “to go crazy/bananas!” For some reason, it’s much funnier with the word cucumber 😂
“Det blæser en halv pelikan”
Not sure exactly how this phrase originated, but this means, “it’s blowing a half pelican,” which is just another way of saying that it’s really windy outside!
Prutte om prisen
This literally means to “fart about the price” which in a way makes sense, because the phrase means to haggle!
“Det koster det hvide ud af øjnene”
This phrase translates to “it costs the white out of the eyes.” It’s one way of saying that something is very, very expensive! Funnily enough, a similar idiom in English is to say “it costs an arm and a leg,” so it’s not such a stretch that another language has a similar way of referring to how expensive something is!
“Rødgrød med Fløde”
We couldn’t write a blog post about the Danish language without bringing up one of the Danes’ favorite phrases to make non-Danish speakers attempt to say! While this phrase just means “red porridge with cream,” it contains some of the hardest letter combinations for non-native speakers to pronounce! We truly apologize to everyone we have laughed at after making them say this 😂
Thanks for Reading
Thanks for reading today’s blog post – we hope you learned something new! The sources (if you are interested) used were mainly Wikipedia articles and Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as ourselves. We are hoping to do more posts about the Danish language in the future, so stay tuned. If you have any ideas or suggestions for topics, we are always open to hearing from you! Drop us a DM on social media, an email, or a comment on here – we would love to hear your thoughts 😊
I had to look up “rødgrød med fløde” on forvo, and now I can’t stop trying to say it though I sound like I’m gagging while having a seizure. 😂 Trying to articulate the soft D’s makes me go cucumbers 🥒 but I do love the sounds of the language! And oddly enough, it actually is blowing a half pelican here today and I’m definitely going to be using this phrase and enjoying confusing other non-Danish people.
Thanks and keep up the good work. 😊
Hahaha, thank you for this wonderful comment! Yes, it’s such a challenging phrase to pronounce, and the D’s are killer 😂 I love using Danish idioms in English to confuse others, and I sometimes do it accidentally 😆 Blowing a half pelican is a great one! Thanks for following along, happy to hear from you and hope you keep following along with the blog ❤️