Languages
Main article: Languages of Denmark
Danish is the de facto national language of Denmark.[158] Faroese and Greenlandic are the official languages of the Faroe Islands and Greenland respectively.[158] German is a recognised minority language in the area of the former South Jutland County (now part of the Region of Southern Denmark), which was part of the German Empire prior to the Treaty of Versailles.[158] Danish and Faroese belong to the North Germanic (Nordic) branch of the Indo-European languages, along with Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish.[159] The languages are so closely related that it is possible for Danish, Norwegian and Swedish speakers to understand each other with relatively little effort. Danish is more distantly related to German, which is a West Germanic language. Greenlandic or "Kalaallisut" belongs to the Eskimo–Aleut languages; it is closely related to the Inuit languages in Canada, such as Inuktitut, and entirely unrelated to Danish.[159]

A large majority (86%) of Danes speak English as a second language,[160] generally with a high level of proficiency. German is the second-most spoken foreign language, with 47% reporting a conversational level of proficiency.[158] Denmark had 25,900 native speakers of German in 2007 (mostly in the South Jutland area)