Danish grammar


Danish grammar is either the study of the grammar of the Danish language, or the grammatical system itself of the Danish language.

Nouns

Inflections

There are two grammatical genders in Danish: common and neuter. All nouns are mostly arbitrarily divided into these two classes. The singular indefinite article is en for common-gender nouns and et for neuter nouns. They are often informally called n-words and t-words.
En dreng. A boy.
Et fængsel. A jail.
Unlike English, definite nouns in Danish are rendered by adding a suffix to the indefinite form. The definite singular ending is -en for common-gender nouns and -et for neuter nouns.
Drengen. The boy.
Fængslet. The jail.
The plural noun suffixes are more complex. The following table shows the possible inflections of regular Danish nouns of both grammatical genders.
The most common plural ending is -er. Besides an extremely large number of other nouns, nearly all those that end with unstressed -e take it, as does the vast majority of those that end with a monophthong other than -e.
The zero plural ending is predominantly used with neuter nouns.
The plural ending -e is used with:
In the singular definite, common-gender nouns always take the ending -en, while neuter nouns always take -et. Plural definite adds -ene to the indefinite if it has no suffix or a borrowed suffix, otherwise -ne.
Nouns that end in unstressed -e lose the -e when adding an ending: kvinde, kvind-en, kvind-er, kvind-erne "woman". Nouns that end in unstressed -er, -el, or -en lose or keep the e according to the rules below. When the loss of the e leads to a double consonant coming immediately before the stem-final r, l, or n, it is simplified.
It is common for nouns to change during inflection in ways that aren't reflected in spelling. They can lose stød, add stød, or lengthen the root vowel.
There are many nouns with irregular plurals. Here are some examples:
Most either have vowel change with or without a suffix, or are foreign words using their native plurals.
If a noun is preceded by a number composed of more than one distinct part, the last part determines the grammatical number. 1001 Nat and to en halv time use singular nouns, whereas English would use "nights" and "hours".

Grammatical case

There are no case declensions in Danish nouns. Nouns are inflected only for possession which is expressed with a possessive enclitic, for example min fars hus "my father's house" where the noun far carries the possessive enclitic. This is however not a case of genitive case marking, because in the case of longer noun phrases the -s attaches to the last word in the phrase, which need not be the head-noun or even a noun at all. For example, the phrases kongen af Danmark's bolsjefabrik "the king of Denmark's candy factory", or det er pigen Uffe bor sammen meds datter "that is the daughter of the girl that Uffe lives with", where the enclitic attaches to a stranded preposition.
When the noun can be considered part of the possessor noun physically, the possessive is often replaced by a prepositional phrase, e.g. låget på spanden "the lid on the bucket", bagsiden af huset "the back of the house" rather than spandens låg, husets bagside, which are not incorrect but more formal, and less informative.
Older case forms exist as like i live "alive", på tide "about time", på fode "on his foot". Similarly, the genitive is used in certain fossilised prepositional phrases : til fods "on foot", til vands/søs "by water/sea", gå til hånde "assist".

Articles

The indefinite article, en, et, is prepositive as in all European languages that have an indefinite article, and the origin of the word is the same as in the other Germanic languages, namely the numeral én, ét "one". There is no indefinite article in the plural.
The definite article, -en, -et, -ne, is postpositive as in the other Scandinavian languages save the West Jutlandic dialect of Danish, which has the prepositive æ. The postpositive article comes from an old pronoun, Old Norse inn, "that", related to English yon and German jener. The point of departure may be expressions like ormr inn langi > ormrinn langi "the long serpent". Yet, Danish only uses the postpositive article when the noun does not carry an attributive adjective or a genitive, while otherwise a prepositive den, det, de is used instead :

Pronouns

1) Since the 1970s, the polite form De is no longer the normal form of addressing adult strangers. It is only used in formal letters or when addressing the royal family. It is sometimes used by shop assistants and waiters to flatter their customers. As a general rule, one can use du almost in every situation without offending anyone.
2) The reflexive pronoun is used when the object or possessive is identical to the grammatical subject of the sentence: han slog sin kone ihjel "he killed his wife" ~ han slog hans kone ihjel "he killed his wife". It is also used when referring to the subject of an infinite nexus, e.g. an accusative with infinitive: Rødhætte bad jægeren hilse sin kone "Little Red Riding Hood asked the hunter to greet his wife", where sin refers to the hunter. This difference is often not observed by Jutlandic speakers.
3) Vores is the only form normally used in current spoken language; vor, vort and vore are more archaic, and perceived as formal or solemn.

Verbs

In contemporary Danish, the verb has up to nine distinct forms, as shown in the chart below.

Person and number

Verbs do not vary according to person or number: jeg venter, du venter, han, hun, den, det venter, vi venter, I venter, de venter. However, until the beginning of the twentieth century, it was normal to inflect the present tense in number in educated prose. There existed also a special plural form in the imperative. These forms are not used anymore, but can be found in older prose:
For example, Søger, saa skulle I finde "Seek, and ye shall find" ; in the 1992 translation Søg, så skal I finde.

Tenses

Like in other Germanic languages, the conjugation of verb tenses is divided into two groups: The first group, the so-called weak verbs, indicates the past tense by adding the suffixes -ede or -te. The second, called strong verbs, forms the past tense with a zero ending and, in most cases, certain vowel changes.
The future tense is formed with the modal verbs vil or skal and the infinitive, e.g. tror du, det vil regne, "do you think it's going to rain", vi skal nok komme igen i morgen, "we'll come again tomorrow". Often the present tense is also used as future, only with the addition of a time specification i morgen køber han en bil, "tomorrow he'll buy a car".
In the perfect, the word har is placed before the past participle: han har købt en bil, "he has bought a car". In certain words implying a movement, however, er is used instead: han er gået sin vej, "he has gone". In such cases har is used for the activity, while er is used if the result is what is interesting. Han har rejst meget, "he has traveled a lot". Han er rejst, "he is gone", he is not here anymore.
Similarly, the pluperfect is formed with havde or var: han havde købt en bil, han var gået sin vej. NB. The perfect is used in many cases where English would have a simple preterite.

Moods

In Danish, there are two finite moods, indicative and imperative. Depending on interpretation, there may also be an optative.
  1. The indicative mood is used everywhere, unless the imperative or optative is required.
  2. The imperative is used in commands: "Kør langsomt!", "Kom her!".
  3. The optative is rare and used only in archaic or poetic constructions. It's probably more correct to describe these as elliptical constructions leaving out a modal and just retaining an infinitive, e.g. "Gud være lovet!", "Kongen længe leve!".
In short, Danish morphology offers very little in moods. Just like English, Danish depends on tense and modals to express moods.
Example: Where a language with an explicit subjunctive mood would use that mood in hypothetical statements, Danish uses a strategy similar to that of English. Compare:
a. Real, or at least possibly real, situation in present time: Hvis Peter køber kage, laver Anne kaffe. "If Peter buys cake, Anne makes coffee." Here, the present indicative is used.
b. Real, or at least possibly real, situation in past time: Hvis Peter købte kage, lavede Anne kaffe. "If Peter bought cake, Anne made coffee." Here, the past indicative is used.
c. Unreal situation in present time: Hvis Peter købte kage, lavede Anne kaffe. "If Peter bought cake, Anne made coffee." Here, the past indicative is used.
d1. Unreal situation in past time: Hvis Peter havde købt kage, havde Anne lavet kaffe. "If Peter had bought cake, Anne had made coffee." Here, the pluperfect indicative is used.
A language with a full subjunctive mood, the way it typically works in Indo-European languages, would translate cases a. and b. with indicative forms of the verb, and case c. and d. with subjunctive forms. In the hypothetical cases, Danish and English create distance from reality by "moving the tense one step back". Although these sentences do work, however, it would be normal in Danish as well as in English, to further stress the irreality by adding a modal. So that, instead of either example c. or d1, Danish and English would add "ville/would" in the main sentence, creating what may be considered a periphrastic subjunctive:
d2. Unreal situation in past time: Hvis Peter havde købt kage, ville Anne have lavet kaffe. "If Peter had bought cake, Anne would have made coffee."

Voice

Like the other Scandinavian languages, Danish has a special inflection for the passive voice with the suffix -s, which is historically a reduced enclitic form of the reflexive pronoun sig, e.g. han kalder sig "he calls himself" > han kaldes "he is called".
Danish has a competing periphrastic form of the passive formed with the verb blive.
In addition to the proper passive constructions, the passive also denotes:
  1. a reciprocal form : Hans og Jørgen mødtes på gaden "John and George met on the street", vi ses på onsdag "we'll see each other on Wednesday", I må ikke slås "you must not fight".
  2. an intransitive form : der findes / fandtes mange grunde til at komme "there are / were many reasons why one should come".
  3. an impersonal form: der kæmpes / bliver kæmpet om pladserne "there is a struggle for the seats".
In the preterite, the periphrastic form is preferred in non-formal speech except in reciprocal and impersonal passives: de sås ofte "they often saw each other", der fandtes en lov imod det "there was a law against it".
The s-form of the verb can also imply habitual or repetitive action, e.g. bilen vaskes "the car is washed" vs. bilen bliver vasket "the car is washed"
The s-passive of the perfect participle is regular in Swedish both in the real passive and in other functions, e.g. vårt företag har funnits sedan 1955 "our company has existed since 1955", bilen har setts ute på Stockholms gator "the car has been seen in the streets of S." In Danish, the real passive has only periphrastic forms in the perfect: bilen er blevet set ude på Stockholms gader. In the lexicalised and reciprocal passives, on the other hand, we find a combination of the verb have and the s-passive preterite: e.g. mødtes "have met", har fandtes "have existed" etc..

Present participles

The present participle is used to a much lesser extent than in English. The dangling participle, a characteristic feature of English, is not used in Danish. Instead Danish uses subordinate or coordinate clauses with a finite verb, e.g. eftersom han var konge, var det ham, der måtte bestemme, "Being the king, he had the last word". The present participle is used in two circumstances:
  1. as an attributive adjective: en dræbende tavshed, "a boring silence", en galoperende inflation, "a runaway inflation", hendes rødmende kinder, "her blushing cheeks".
  2. adverbially with verbs of movement: han gik syngende ned ad gaden, "he walked down the street singing"
If the present participle carries an object or an adverb, the two words are normally treated as a compound orthographically and prosodically: et menneskeædende uhyre, "a man-eating monster", en hurtigløbende bold, "a fast ball", fodbold- og kvindeelskende mænd, "men loving football and women".

Past participles

The past participle is used primarily in the periphrastic constructions of the passive and the perfect. It is often used in dangling constructions in the solemn prose style: Således oplyst kan vi skride til afstemning, "Now being informed, we can take a vote", han tog, opfyldt af had til tyrannen, ivrig del i forberedelserne til revolutionen, "filled with hatred of the tyrant, he participated eagerly in the preparations for the revolution".
The past participle of the weak verbs has the ending -et or -t. The past participle of the strong verbs originally had the ending -en, neuter -et, but the common form is now restricted to the use as an adjective, and it has not been preserved in all verbs. When it is combined with er and har to form passive and perfect constructions, the neuter form, which happens to be identical to the ending of the weak verbs, is used. In the Jutlandic dialects, -en is frequently used in such constructions.
As to the voice of the past participle, it is passive if the verb is transitive, and active if it is intransitive.

Infinitive and verbal nouns

The infinitive may be defined as a verb form that is equivalent to a noun syntactically. The Danish infinitive may be used as the subject or object of a verb like in English: at rejse er at leve "to travel is to live", jeg elsker at spise kartofler "I love to eat potatoes". Furthermore, the Danish infinitive may also be governed by a preposition : han tog livet af sig ved at springe ud af et vindue "he killed himself by jumping out of a window".
The infinitive normally has the marker at, pronounced or in normal speech, thereby being homonymous with the conjunction og "and", with which it is sometimes confused in spelling. The bare infinitive is used after the modal verbs kunne, ville, skulle, måtte, turde, burde.
A rarer form is the verbal noun with the ending -en which is used when the infinitive carries a pronoun, an indefinite article or an adjective: hans evindelige skrigen var enerverende, "his never-ending crying was enervating", der var en løben og råben på gangene, "people ran and cried in the hall". This use has a connotation of something habitual and is often used in a negative sense. It is used in formal information like Henstillen af cykler forbudt, "It is prohibited to leave your bike here." Whereas the infinitive is accompanied with adjectives in the neuter, the verbal noun governs the common gender. Due to the rarity of this form, Danes often mistakenly write Henstilling af cykler forbudt instead, using a more familiar word form.
Verbal nouns like viden "knowledge" or kunnen "ability" have become lexicalised due to the influence of German. Like the proper verbal noun, these forms have no plural, and they cannot carry the definite article; so, when English has the knowledge, Danish must use a pronoun or a circumlocution: e.g. hans viden, denne viden, den viden man havde.
Danish has various suffixes for turning a verb into a real noun:

Overview

The Danish numbers are:

Vigesimal system

Counting above forty is in part based on a base 20 number system, called vigesimal: halvtred-s = 2 x 20, tre-s = 3 x 20, halvfjerd-s = 3 x 20, fir-s = 4 x 20, halvfem-s = 4 x 20. This is unlike Swedish and Norwegian, both of which use a decimal system.
The word fyrre / fyrretyve = "40" does not belong to the vigesimal system. The optional second part of the word is not the number tyve, "20", but an old plural of ti, "ten" ; the first part is a variant of the number fire, "four". Similarly, tredive is a compound of tre, "three", and a weakened form of the old plural of ti, "ten".
Vigesimal systems are known in several European languages: French, Breton, Welsh, Albanian, and Basque. Some scholars speculate that the system belongs to an "Old European" substratum, whereas others argue that the system is a recent innovation of the Middle Ages. See Vigesimal.

Sequence of numbers

The ones are placed before the tens with an intervening og : toogfyrre, seksoghalvfjers. The ones and the tens are placed after the hundreds with an optional og: to hundred femoghalvfjers. This system is similar to that of German and Dutch, but unlike that of Swedish.

Adjectives and adverbs

Declension

There are three forms of the adjective in Danish:
  1. basic form or common, used with singular words of the common gender.
  2. : en billig bog, "a cheap book"; en stor dreng, "a big boy"
  3. t-form or neuter, used with singular words of the neuter gender and as an adverb.
  4. : et billigt tæppe, "a cheap carpet"; et stort hus, "a big house"
  5. : han bor billigt, "he has a low rent "
  6. e-form or plural / definite, used in the plural and with a definite article, a pronoun or a genitive.
  7. : den billige bog, "the cheap book"; hans store hus, "his big house"
  8. : billige bøger, "cheap books"; store huse, "big houses"
Only words ending in a consonant take -e. Only words ending in a consonant or the vowels -i or -å take -t. Others are unchanged.

Agreement

The adjective must agree with the word that it qualifies in both gender and number. This rules also applies when the adjective is used predicatively: huset er stort, "the house is big", or bøgerne er billige, "the books are cheap".
An exception to the rule of agreement are the superlative and, in regular prose, the past participle when used in the verbal meaning.

Definite form

The definite e-form is historically identical to the so-called weak declension of the Germanic adjective, cf. German ein großes Haus, "a big house" ~ das große Haus, "the big house". But whereas the German definite form is not used after a genitive, or following the bare forms of the possessive and indefinite pronouns – but conversely is used after the indefinite pronoun in the forms that have an ending – the Danish definite form is used in all instances after any determiner save the indefinite article:

Three degrees of comparison

The Danish adjectives and adverbs are inflected according to the three degrees of comparison. The comparative has the ending -ere and the superlative has the ending -st : e.g. hurtig, hurtigere, hurtigst, "quick, -er, -est"; fræk, frækkere, frækkest, "impertinent/audacious/kinky, -er, -est"; lang, længere, længst, "long, -er, -est". The choice between -st and -est is determined by the syllable structure, whereas the variant -re is used only in a few frequent comparatives.
In many cases, especially in longer words and words of a Latin or Greek origin, the comparative and superlative are formed with the adverbs mere and mest instead: e.g. intelligent, mere intelligent, mest intelligent.
The comparative is inflexible, and it is not used with the definite article. The conjunction of comparison is end, "than".
The superlative is inflected like the positive ; længst, længste. When used as a predicate, the basic form is used instead of the e-form: hans ben er længst "his legs are the longest". And since a superlative used attributively must necessarily modify something definite, the e-form is always used there: den vredeste killing er vredest "the angriest kitty is angriest".

Irregularities

The inflection of some adjectives is irregular: