Question words in Danish

Have you ever wondered why the Danish word hvordan ‘how’ is never used in questions like ‘how long’, ‘how much’ and ‘how big’? It is surprising, considering that the closest “relatives” of Danish (e.g. Swedish, Icelandic, German, Dutch and English) all use the word for “how” in such questions, but Danish uses hvor ‘where’. So, instead of asking ‘how much?’ we ask hvor meget, literally. ‘where much?’. Examples are shown in (1):

1)

Hvor længe varer flyveturen? ‘how long does the flight last?’

Hvor meget sukker skal vi bruge? ‘how much sugar do we need?’

Hvor højt kan hun springe? ‘how high can she jump?’

Where does the unexpected use of this question word come from? I usually just suffice to tell my students, when they ask (and they often ask about this), that where many other languages have chosen “how” as their default question word, the one to combine with adjectives and adverbs in questions like in (1), Danish has chosen hvor “where”. Both of these choices can be seen as random but they serve the same purpose.

But few things in language are quite random, and my hypothesis is as follows (if this is common knowledge among experts on the history of Danish and the Germanic language family, I apologize in advance):

The short answer is, that the Danish word hvor ‘where’ used to mean ‘how’. This makes sense not only in light of the sister languages mentioned before, but also when we look at older Danish literature, hymns and even in the speech of living, breathing, elderly Danes, who still use that word in this sense. Examples are shown in (2).

2)

Hvor kan I dog gruble og græde, så længe Guds himmel er blå?

‘How can you ponder and cry, so long as God’s sky is blue?’

Hvor kan du dog i Synden le?

‘How can you laugh in the face of sin?’

Hvor kan politikerne så meget som få den tanke at bygge der?

‘How can the politicians as much as get the idea to build there?’

Hvor kunne du gøre det?

‘How could you do it?’

As mentioned before, hvor has today been replaced by hvordan with the meaning ‘how’. But it is interesting to take a look at the role of hvor in the formation of a few other question words in Danish: hvordan ‘how?’ and hvorfor ‘why?’, hvornår ‘when?’. We already mentioned hvordan ‘how’, but it can actually be divided into hvor and dan. The second part, dan, does not make sense on its own, but we find it in other words such as the ones in (3).

3)

Hvordan ‘how?’

Sådan ‘thus (in that way)’

Ligedan ‘likewise (in the same way)’

As you can see, these words all have to do with ways to do things, that is, the answer to the question “how?”.

Similarly, hvorfor ‘why’ can be divided into hvor and for, the last of which means the same as in English, and Danish also has a number of other words that contain it like derfor ‘therefore’.

Finally, hvornår consists of hvor and når, which itself means ‘when’ but used in sentences that are not questions like in (4).

4)

hvornår kommer du og besøger mig?

‘when are you coming to visit me?’

når du inviterer mig!

‘when you invite me’

Så hvornår ‘when?’ literally means ‘where when?’