Danish orthography

Danish orthography is the system and norms used for writing the Danish language, including spelling and punctuation.

Officially, the norms are set by the Danish language council through the publication of Retskrivningsordbogen.

Danish currently uses a 29-letter Latin-script alphabet, identical to the Norwegian alphabet, with an additional three letters: '' Æ'', '' Ø'' and '' Å''.

History

There were spelling reforms in 1872, 1889 (with some changes in 1892), and 1948. These spelling reforms were based in the decisions of the Nordic spelling conference of 1869, whose goal was to abolish spellings that are justified by neither phonetics nor etymology and to bring Danish and Swedish orthographies closer.

The reform of 1872 replaced the letter by in some words (> , > , > ; however, for words with the change was reverted in 1889), abolished the distinction of the homophonous words ''Thing'' and ''Ting'' (however, the distinction between and was retained), replaced the letter by (''Qvinde''>''Kvinde''), deleted the silent after vowels (''faae''>''faa''), abolished doubling of vowels to signify vowel length (''Steen''>''Sten''), replaced by after vowels (''Vei''>''Vej''), and introduced some smaller spelling changes. In some cases, spelling of loanwords was simplified, but in general the question of spelling loanwords was largely left undecided.

In 1889, was abolished from native words and most loanwords: ''Oxe''>''Okse'', ''Exempel''>''Eksempel''. The letter was deleted from the combinations ''gje, gjæ, gjø, kje, kjæ, kjø'': ''Kjøkken''>''Køkken''. Additionally, spelling of loanwords was standardized. In some cases, simplified spellings were adopted ( sounded mostly becomes ; in words of Greek origin are replaced by ), but in many cases original spellings were retained.

Danish formerly used both (in Fraktur) and (in Antiqua), though it was suggested to use for /ø/ and for /œ/, which was also sometimes employed.N. M. Petersen: ''Dänische Sprachlehre für Deutsche'' (i.e. Danish Grammar for Germans), Kopenhagen, 1830, p. 1–3
at books.google
The distinction between and was optionally allowed in 1872, recommended in 1889, but rejected in 1892, although the orthographic dictionaries continued to use and (collated as if they were the same letter) until 1918 and the book '' Folkehöjskolens Sangbog'' continued to use and in its editions as late as 1962.

Earlier instead of , or a ligature of two was also used.N. M. Petersen: ''Dänische Sprachlehre für Deutsche'' (i.e. Danish Grammar for Germans), Kopenhagen, 1830, p. 1–3
at books.google

In 1948 was re-introduced or officially introduced in Danish, replacing . The letter then came from the Swedish alphabet, where it has been in official use since the 18th century. The initial proposal was to place first in the Danish alphabet, before . Its place as the last letter of the alphabet, as in Norwegian, was decided in 1955. The former digraph still occurs in personal names and in Danish geographical names. However, in geographical names, is allowed as an alternative spelling: ''Aabenraa'' or ''Åbenrå'', '' Aalborg'' or ''Ålborg'', '' Aarhus'' or ''Århus''. remains in use as a transliteration, if the letter is not available for technical reasons. is treated like in alphabetical sorting, not like two adjacent , meaning that while is the first letter of the alphabet, is the last.

All nouns in Danish used to be capitalized, as in German. The reform of 1948 abolished the capitalization of all nouns.

Alphabet

The Danish alphabet is based upon the Latin alphabet and has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1980 when was separated from .

* , and are often transcribed with , and even though the first set is voiceless, the second one is aspirated and the rhotic is uvular, not alveolar.
* In monomorphematic words, vowels are usually short before two or more consonants + .
* Vowels are usually long before a single consonant + .
* In two consecutive vowels the stressed vowel is always long and the unstressed is always short.

The letters are not used in the spelling of native words. Therefore, the phonemic interpretation of letters in loanwords depends on the donating language. However, Danish tends to preserve the original spelling of loanwords. In particular, a that represents is almost never transliterated to in Danish, as would most often happen in Norwegian. Many words originally derived from Latin roots retain in their Danish spelling, for example Norwegian vs Danish . However, the letter representing is mostly normalized to . The letter is used in a few loanwords like (from English), but is normally replaced by in words from Latin (e.g. ) and by in words from French (e.g. ). is normally replaced by in words from Latin, Greek, or French, e.g. ; but is retained: 1) at the beginning of words of Greek origin, where it sounds , e.g. ; 2) before in words of Latin origin, e.g. ; 3) in chemical terms, e.g. ; 4) in loanwords from English, e.g. ; 5) at the end of French loanwords, where it is silent, e.g. . The verb , derived from the name of the letter itself, can be spelled either way. The letter is also used instead of ''eks-'' in abbreviations: , also written .

The "foreign" letters also sometimes appear in the spelling of otherwise-indigenous family names. For example, many of the Danish families that use the surname ''Skov'' (literally: "Woods") spell it ''Schou''. Also has been restored in some geographical names: ''Nexø'', ''Gladsaxe'', ''Faxe''.

The difference between the Dano-Norwegian and the Swedish alphabet is that Swedish uses. instead of , and instead of — similar to German. Also, the collating order for these three letters is different: Å, Ä, Ö.

In current Danish, is recognized as a separate letter from . The transition was made in 1980; before that, was considered to be a variation of and words using it were alphabetized accordingly (e.g.: "Wales, Vallø, Washington, Wedellsborg, Vendsyssel"). The Danish version of the alphabet song still states that the alphabet has 28 letters; the last line reads , i.e. "that makes twenty-eight". However, today the letter is considered an official letter.

Diacritics

Standard Danish orthography has no compulsory diacritics, but allows the use of an acute accent for disambiguation. Most often, an accent on marks a stressed syllable in one of a pair of homographs that have different stresses, for example (a boy) versus (one boy). It can also be part of the official spelling such as in (avenue) or (idea).

Less often, any vowel except may be accented to indicate stress on a ''word'', either to clarify the meaning of the sentence, or to ease the reading otherwise. For example: ("I was standing"), versus ("I got out of bed"); ("the dog does (it)"), versus ("the dog barks"). Most often, however, such distinctions are made using typographical emphasis (italics, underlining) or simply left to the reader to infer from the context, and the use of accents in such cases may appear dated. A common context in which the explicit acute accent is preferred is to disambiguate (''a'', indefinite article) and (''one'', numeral) in central places in official written materials such as advertising, where clarity is important.

Computing standards

In computing, several different coding standards have existed for this alphabet:

* DS 2089, later established in international standard ISO 646
* IBM PC code page 865
* ISO 8859-1
* Unicode

See also

* Comparison of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish#Writing_system
* Comparison of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish#Pronunciation and sound system
* Danish braille
* Danish phonology
* Icelandic orthography
* Futhark, the Germanic runes used formerly
* Spelling alphabets
* Swedish alphabet

References

External links

Type Danish characters online

1889 spelling reform (in Danish)

1948 spelling reform (in Danish)

Current orthographic rules (in Danish)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Danish Orthography

Orthography
Indo-European Latin-script orthographies