DTU Campus Village
A mix of languages is present at Campus Village. While some students with common nationalities talk to each other in their native languages, many students make an effort to learn another language. Many international students hope to learn English by studying in Denmark, as most Danes speak English since a young age. Some Campus Village residents manage to learn phrases from an additional foreign language like French or Portuguese through living with native speakers of those languages. Some students attend a class at night to learn Danish.
Danish language
Danish and English are both Germanic languages, Danish a North Germanic language descended from Old Norse and English a West Germanic language descended from Old English, and Old Norse exerted a strong influence on Old English in the early medieval period. To see their shared Germanic heritage, one merely has to note the many common words that are very similar in the two languages. For example, commonly used Danish nouns and prepositions such as "have", "over", "under", "for", "give", "flag," "salt," and "kat" are easily recognizable in their written form to English speakers. Similarly, some other words are almost identical to their Scots equivalents, e.g., "kirke" (Scots "kirk", i.e., 'church') or "barn" (Scots "bairn", i.e. 'child'). In addition, the word "by", meaning "village" or "town", occurs in many English place-names, such as "Whitby" and "Selby", as remnants of the Viking occupation. During the latter period, English adopted "are", the third person plural form of the verb "to be", as well as the corresponding personal pronoun form "they" from contemporary Old Norse.