X-Nico

6 unusual facts about North Germanic languages


Danish grammar

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 ("himself, herself, itself, themselves"), e.g. han kalder sig "he calls himself" > han kaldes "he is called".

The definite article, -en, -et, -(e)ne, is postpositive as in the other Scandinavian languages save the West Jutlandic dialect of Danish, which has the prepositive æ (inflexible).

Danish phonology

Danish is a Scandinavian language related closely to Swedish and Norwegian, and more distantly to Icelandic and Faroese as well as to the other Germanic languages.

Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff

He is mainly self-taught and has mastered several languages, including Hebrew, Latin, German, French, English and the Nordic languages.

German adjectives

No ending is applied otherwise: predicative adjectives, those in English separated from the noun by is or are, are not declined and are indistinguishable from adverbs, unlike in Romance and North Germanic languages.

World Englishes

The original Old English language was then influenced by two further waves of invasion: the first by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family, who conquered and colonized parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries; the second by the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety called Anglo-Norman.


Bertha Phillpotts

Dame Bertha Surtees Phillpotts (1877–1932) was an English scholar in Scandinavian languages, literature, history, archaeology and anthropology.

Demographics of Iceland

Of the North Germanic languages, the Icelandic language is closest to the Old Norse language and has remained relatively unchanged since the 12th century.

South Germanic

This usage is particularly found in the study of Germanic mythology and culture, where it covers English and German sources in contrast to those from Scandinavia, which are termed North Germanic.


see also