Danish language explained to kids

Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in Denmark, Greenland and in the region of Southern Schleswig in northern Germany. It is also spoken by 50,000 people in the US state of Wisconsin. Danish is closely related to Norwegian and Swedish, and to a lesser extent English. Danish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Age. Danish was the first Germanic language to undergo a process of standardization, emerging as the official language of Denmark in the 13th century. Danish is notable for its use of the letter Æ, which is not found in any other Germanic language. Other notable features of Danish include its use of stød, a kind of glottal stop, and its very frequent use of reduplication. Danish is a very phonetic language, meaning that a word is pronounced approximately as it is spelled. This makes Danish relatively easy to learn for speakers of other Germanic languages, but can also make it challenging for speakers of languages with very different phonetic systems, such as Chinese or Arabic.