Denmark Culture & Language

Danish culture punches far above the country’s size, and the thread running through most of it is a preference for the well-made and unshowy over the grand.

Design

Danish modern furniture — Arne Jacobsen’s Egg and Ant chairs, Hans Wegner’s Wishbone, Finn Juhl’s cabinetwork — came out of a mid-century marriage of cabinetmaking craft and functionalist theory, and the objects are still in production. Georg Jensen silver, Royal Copenhagen porcelain, Poul Henningsen’s glare-free lamps and Kaare Klint’s teaching lie behind it. Bjarke Ingels carries it into architecture now.

Writing and thought

Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote the fairy tales in Odense and Copenhagen; Soren Kierkegaard, who effectively began existentialism; Karen Blixen, who wrote the memoir of her Kenyan coffee farm and lived at Rungstedlund north of the capital.

Film and television

The Dogme 95 manifesto by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg imposed a stripped-down set of rules on filmmaking and became internationally influential. The television dramas — The Killing, Borgen — exported the country’s idiom wholesale.

Food

Smorrebrod, the open rye sandwich, is the tradition. The New Nordic movement that Noma led from 2004 rebuilt Danish cooking around foraging and local produce and changed restaurant kitchens worldwide. Also pastry, which Danes call Viennese bread.

Music

Carl Nielsen, working at the same time as Sibelius across the Baltic, wrote six symphonies that are the backbone of the Danish repertoire, and his face was on the hundred-krone note for years. The Royal Danish Ballet has kept the nineteenth-century choreography of August Bournonville in continuous performance, which no other company has managed, and it remains the reason dancers come here to train.

Lego

Invented in Billund in 1932, and the name is a contraction of leg godt, play well.

Danish is a North Germanic language, closely related to Norwegian and Swedish on paper but pronounced in a way that makes it much harder to follow — heavily reduced vowels, swallowed consonants and the glottal stod. Danes themselves joke about it.

English is spoken almost universally and to a very high standard, by essentially everyone under sixty. Foreign television is subtitled rather than dubbed, which is most of the reason. A visitor genuinely needs no Danish, and Danes will usually switch to English before you have finished trying.

German is common in south Jutland and among older people.

Worth having anyway: hej for both hello and goodbye, tak for thank you — used constantly and doing a lot of work — and skal as a toast, with eye contact.