Dialects

Map of Danish dialects
Standard Danish (rigsdansk) is the language based on dialects spoken in and around the capital of Copenhagen. Unlike Swedish and Norwegian, Danish does not have more than one regional speech norm. More than 25% of all Danish speakers live in the metropolitan area of the capital and most government agencies, institutions and major businesses keep their main offices in Copenhagen, something that has resulted in a very homogeneous national speech norm. In contrast, though Oslo (Norway) and Stockholm (Sweden) are quite dominant in terms of speech standards, cities like Bergen, Gothenburg and the Malmö-Lund region are large and influential enough to create secondary regional norms, making the standard language more varied than is the case with Danish. The general agreement is that Standard Danish is based on a form of Copenhagen dialect, but the specific norm is, as with most language norms, difficult to pinpoint for both laypeople and scholars. Historically Standard Danish emerged as a compromise between the dialect of Zealand and Scania. The first layers of it can be seen in east Danish provincial law texts such as Skånske Lov, just as we can recognize west Danish in laws from the same ages in Jyske Lov.
Despite the relative cultural monopoly of the capital and the centralised government, the divided geography of the country allowed distinct rural dialects to flourish during the centuries. Such "genuine" dialects were formerly spoken by a vast majority of the population, but have declined much since the 1960s. They still exist in communities out on the countryside, but most speakers in these areas generally speak a regionalized form of Standard Danish, when speaking with one who speaks to them in that same standard. Usually an adaptation of the local dialect to rigsdansk is spoken, though code-switching between the standard-like norm and a distinct dialect is common.

The distribution of one, two, and three grammatical genders in Danish dialects. In Zealand the transition from three to two genders has happened fairly recently. West of the red line the definite article goes before the word as in English or German; east of the line it takes the form of a suffix.
Danish is divided into three distinct dialect groups:
Eastern Danish (østdansk), including the Bornholm, Scanian and Halland dialects
Island Danish (ømål or ødansk), including dialects of Zealand, Funen, Lolland, Falster, and Møn
Jutlandic (jysk), further divided in North, East, West and South Jutlandic
Historically, Eastern Danish includes what are occasionally considered Southern Swedish dialects. The background for this lies in the loss of the originally Danish provinces Blekinge, Halland and Scania to Sweden in 1658. The island Bornholm in the Baltic also belongs to this group, but remained Danish. A few generations ago, the classical dialects spoken in the southern Swedish provinces could still be argued to be more Eastern Danish than Swedish, being similar to the dialect of Bornholm. Today influx of Standard Swedish vocabulary has generally meant that Scanian and Bornholmish are closer to the modern national standards than to each other. The Bornholm dialect has also maintained to this day many ancient features, such as a distinction between three grammatical genders, which the central Island Danish dialects gave up during the 20th century. Standard Danish has two genders, and Western Jutlandic only one, similar to English.
Today, Standard Danish is most similar to the Island Danish dialect group.