The Danish alphabet is based upon the Latin alphabet and has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1980 when W was separated from V.
, 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 + e.
Vowels are usually long before a single consonant + e.
In two consecutive vowels the stressed vowel is always long and the unstressed is always short.
The letters c, q, w, x and z are not used in the spelling of indigenous 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 'c' that represents is almost never normalized to 's' in Danish, as would most often happen in Norwegian. Many words originally derived from Latin roots retain 'c' in their Danish spelling, for example Norwegian sentrum vs Danish centrum. However, the letter 'c' representing is mostly normalized to 'k'. The letter 'q' is used in a few loanwords like quiz, but qu is normally replaced by kv in words from Latin and by k in words from French at the beginning of words of Greek origin, where it sounds, e.g. xylograf, xylofon; 2) before 'c' in words of Latin origin, e.g. excellent, excentrisk; 3) in chemical terms, e.g. oxalsyre, oxygen; 4) in loanwords from English, e.g. exitpoll, foxterrier, maxi, sex, taxi; 5) at the end of French loanwords, where it is silent, e.g. jaloux. The verb exe/ekse, derived from the name of the letter 'x' itself, can be spelled either way. The letter 'x' is also used instead of eks- in abbreviations: fx, hhx, htx. 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 spell it Schou.
Diacritics
Standard Danish orthography has no compulsory diacritics, but allows the use of an acute accent for disambiguation. Most often, an accent on e marks a stressed syllable in one of a pair of homographs that have different stresses, for example en dreng versus én dreng. It can also be part of the official spelling such as in allé or idé. Less often, any vowel except å 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: jeg stód op, versus jeg stod óp ; hunden gør , versus hunden gǿr. Most often, however, such distinctions are made using typographical emphasis 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 en/et and én/ét in central places in official written materials such as advertising, where clarity is important.
History
There were spelling reforms in 1872, 1889, and 1948. Danish formerly used both ø and ö, though it was suggested to use ø for IPA /ø/ and ö for IPA /œ/, which was also sometimes employed. The distinction between ø and ö was optionally allowed in 1872, recommended in 1889, but rejected in 1892, although the orthographic dictionaries continued to use ø and ö until 1918. Earlier instead of aa the letter å or a ligature of two a was also used. In 1948 the letter å was re-introduced or officially introduced in Danish, replacingaa. 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 Å first in the Danish alphabet, before A. Its place as the last letter of the alphabet, as in Norwegian, was decided in 1955. The former digraphAa still occurs in personal names, and in Danish geographical names. Aa remains in use as a transliteration, if the letter is not available for technical reasons. Aa is treated like Å in alphabetical sorting, not like two adjacent letters A, meaning that while a is the first letter of the alphabet, aa is the last. The difference between the Dano-Norwegian and the Swedish alphabet is that Swedish uses the variant Ä instead of Æ, and the variant Ö instead of Ø — similar to German. Also, the collating order for these three letters is different: Å, Ä, Ö. In current Danish, W is recognized as a separate letter from V. The transition was made in 1980; before that, the W was merely considered to be a variation of the letter V and words using it were alphabetized accordingly. The Danish version of the alphabet song still states that the alphabet has 28 letters; the last line reads otte-og-tyve skal der stå, i.e. "that makes twenty-eight". However, today the letter "w" is considered an official letter. All nouns in Danish used to be capitalized, as in German. The reform of 1948 abolished the capitalization of all nouns.
