Short answers, pulled from the story.
Danish is spoken by about 5.5 million people, principally in and around Denmark. Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the German region of Southern Schleswig, and in parts of Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina.
Danish belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Along with Swedish, it descends from the Eastern dialects of Old Norse and is classified as an East Scandinavian or East Nordic language.
The stød is a prosodic feature of Danish involving a form of laryngeal phonation, sometimes described as a creaky voice. It has phonemic status, serving as the sole distinction between words like bønder, meaning 'peasants', and bønner, meaning 'beans'.
A standard form of Danish developed following the Protestant Reformation of 1536 and the spread of the printing press. The first complete Danish Bible translation, published in 1550 by Christiern Pedersen, set the de facto orthographic standard. After 1550, printing presses in Copenhagen came to dominate publication in Danish.
Spoken Danish is considered difficult because of its large vowel inventory of 27 phonemes, its unusual consonant pronunciations, and its prosodic feature the stød. Research shows that Danish children take slightly longer to master the phonological distinctions of Danish compared with children acquiring other languages. Norwegian speakers generally understand both Danish and Swedish better than Swedes and Danes understand each other.
Low German had a profound influence on Danish vocabulary during the Late Middle Ages, when it was the second official language of Denmark-Norway. Of the 500 most frequently used Danish words, 100 are loans from Middle Low German, and those loans still account for about 16-17% of the vocabulary in standard contemporary Danish texts.