DA'NISH LANGUAGE AND LITERA TURE.—LiNGUAUE. The history of the Dan ish language begins properly about the year A.D. when the different Scandinavian dia-' Lets, which until that time had formed one speech, developed into separate languages.. (For an account of the earliest Scandinavian monu ments, see Rms.Es.) The Danish and Swedish formed together the East Northern group, the Icelandic and Norwegian, with the Faroese, the West Northern. The oldest specifically Danish records are runic inscriptions and a few names in Latin MSS. About 1300 appeared several collections of laws, which show the existence of at least three distinct dialects, there being at that time no standard form for literary use. The leveling of inflections, which is as marked a feature of Danish as of English, had already begun, although many forms were still retained. The vocabulary is still in the main Northern, with very few foreign elements. Between 1350 and 1500 the loss of inflections and of other grammatical clistinctions increases rapidly and the language approaches more and more its present form. A striking feature of the vocabu lary is the introduction of foreign words, espe cially those from the French, Latin, and Low German, High German words being sparingly borrowed. The syntax, too, is affected by Latin isms in consequence of the wide use of Latin by Danes. As a result of the publication of the first modern Danish translation of the Bible, that of Christian III. (1550), the vocabulary became fairly fixed, receiving practically its present character. The relation of the Danish Bible to the Danish language is very similar to that of the English Bible to the English Ian gnage. After 1537 Danish became the official language of Norway, the Norwegian language remaining as a collection of dialects spoken chiefly in the country districts. (For the rela tion of these dialects to Danish, see NORWEGIAN 1.xxcuAcE..) Ili the following century. on the other hand, Denmark suffered a loss by the ces sion to Sweden of the Province of Skfine, or Schonen, and within a generation the Swedish took the place of the original Danish.
The principal grammatical changes between the Reformation and 1700 are the partial substi tution of the natural for the grammatical gen tler, and the simplification of the inflections. The vocabulary shows a generous borrowing of French and German words. The different dia lects are still used for literary expression, and it was not until Holberg (1684-1754) that a standard literary Danish may be said to have existed. During the last half of the eighteenth century German and Danish were used side by side in Denmark, very much as Latin and Danish had been used earlier, and so great was the Ger man influence that the Danish State Calendar was published in that language until the first year of the nineteenth century. During the last thirty years, mainly as a result of the war with Germany, the vocabulary has become more and more pure. Whole classes of German words have been replaced by Danish equivalents, and no new German words have been borrowed.
Danish differs in general from its nearest Scandinavian neighbor, Swedish, by a greater leveling of inflections and by less archaic sounds. The most striking single feature of the spoken language is the glottal 'catch: called in Danish Stud (literally a push or thrust). It occurs after certain consonant sounds and consists of a momentary closure of the glottis. It has been compared in its effect upon foreigners to a hic cough. The glottal catch is not found in Dano Norwegian, and it is lacking in some 'of the dialects in Denmark, while Jutish occasionally employs the catch where it is not found in the Seeland dialect. The cultivated standard speech is characterized by a marked tendency to slurring. the enunciation being much less distinct than that of Swedish or of the Danish spoken in There is also much less vocal inflec tion. In Danish, as in German, the pronuncia tion of the stage is very different from that of social intercourse.