ABSTRACT
Danish is spoken by about 5 million speakers. It has developed as a standardized written language with a long tradition. The first law texts in Danish are from around 1200, and in the late fourteenth century, Queen Margaret I decided to change the language of administration from Latin to Danish. As a language of literature it has been used since the fifteenth century. Today speakers of Danish are mostly to be found within the present area of the Kingdom of Denmark, but there is a Danish minority in the Flensburg area in Germany (adjacent to the present Danish–German border), most of whose members are bilingual, very often with German as the dominant language. Until the mid-seventeenth century Danish was used in the Danish provinces of Skåne, Halland and Blekinge which became Swedish in 1658. After that, Swedish became the written language of these provinces, while spoken Danish lingered on for much longer and traces of it can still be found in the dialects of Skåne. During the union with Norway (1389–1814), Danish became increasingly important as a written language in Norway. Danish is still spoken to some extent in the former Danish North Atlantic colonies (Greenland, Faroe Islands), and (to a much lesser degree) it is still retained by Danish emigrants to the United States and Argentine.
