Text: A Short News Item

Danish news writing has its own grammar. It leans on the passive to keep the actor anonymous, packs information into long noun phrases instead of full clauses, signals its sources with a small set of fixed connectives, and uses skal + infinitive to mark a claim as reported rather than confirmed. Once you can decode these moves, the dense front-page register of DR Nyheder or Politiken stops feeling like a wall and starts reading like a system. This page takes a short, authentic-style news item and pulls it apart sentence by sentence.

The text

Mand anholdt efter indbrud i Aarhus

En 34-årig mand blev natten til søndag anholdt i forbindelse med et indbrud i en villa i det nordlige Aarhus. Manden, der ifølge politiet var i besiddelse af flere stjålne genstande, blev standset af en patrulje få hundrede meter fra gerningsstedet. Ejerne af huset havde forinden meldt indbruddet til alarmcentralen. Den anholdte skal angiveligt være kendt af politiet i forvejen, oplyses det. Han fremstilles i grundlovsforhør mandag, oplyser anklagemyndigheden.

English translation

Man arrested after burglary in Aarhus

A 34-year-old man was arrested in the night leading into Sunday in connection with a burglary at a house in northern Aarhus. The man, who according to the police was in possession of several stolen objects, was stopped by a patrol a few hundred metres from the scene. The owners of the house had previously reported the burglary to the emergency services. The arrested man is allegedly already known to the police, it is reported. He will be brought before a preliminary hearing on Monday, the prosecution service states.

Grammar in action

The blive-passive: blev anholdt, blev standset

Danish has two passives. The periphrastic one uses blive ("become") plus the past participle, and it is the workhorse of news reporting because it describes a single, completed event. Blev anholdt ("was arrested") and blev standset ("was stopped") both pick out one specific action at one moment in time.

The agent — who did the arresting — is either omitted entirely (first sentence) or demoted into an af-phrase (af en patrulje). This is exactly why news prefers the passive: the focus belongs on the event and the suspect, not on which officer happened to make the stop. English does the same thing ("was arrested"), so the construction itself feels familiar; what differs is that Danish builds it with blive, not be.

The -s passive: oplyses det, fremstilles

The second passive bolts an -s onto the verb stem. Compared with the blive-passive, the -s passive leans toward the general, the habitual, and the procedural — which makes it the register of officialese and headlines. In oplyses det ("it is reported / it is stated") and han fremstilles i grundlovsforhør ("he is brought before a preliminary hearing"), the -s form sounds institutional and impersonal, precisely the tone a news desk wants.

Note that fremstilles here is present tense doing future work — Danish routinely uses the present for scheduled future events, and the -s form reinforces the sense of a fixed procedure. See the -s passive for the full picture of when each passive is chosen.

Reported speech: skal angiveligt være

This is the construction that trips English speakers up most. Skal normally means "shall" or "must", but in news Danish skal + infinitive marks the whole proposition as a reported, unverified claim — "is said to", "is allegedly". The newspaper is not asserting that the man is known to the police; it is reporting that someone said so.

The adverb angiveligt ("allegedly", "reportedly") makes the hedging explicit, but even without it, skal alone carries the "according to others" meaning. Strip skal out and you get a flat assertion of fact:

This evidential use of skal is a core news-register tool. The companion construction with skulle in the past (skulle have været, "was said to have been") works the same way. See reported speech for how Danish journalists thread attribution through a story.

Formal connectives: ifølge, i forbindelse med, i forvejen

News Danish runs on a small inventory of fixed connective phrases, and recognising them is half the battle.

• ifølge
  • noun = "according to": ifølge politiet ("according to the police"). It attributes information to a source without a full clause.
• i forbindelse med
  • noun = "in connection with": a deliberately vague link between the arrest and the burglary, used precisely because the legal situation is not yet settled.
• i forvejen = "beforehand", "already": kendt af politiet i forvejen means the man had a record before this incident.

These phrases are nominal — they take a noun, not a clause — which feeds directly into the next feature.

Nominal style and complex noun phrases

Compared with everyday spoken Danish, news writing converts actions into nouns and stacks modifiers onto them. Var i besiddelse af ("was in possession of") is a heavier, more formal way of saying havde ("had"). And the subject noun phrases get long and layered:

Manden, der ifølge politiet var i besiddelse af flere stjålne genstande, blev standset...

The subject here is the whole bracketed stretch: a head noun manden, a relative clause der ... var i besiddelse af ..., with an embedded source attribution ifølge politiet and an adjective-plus-participle noun phrase flere stjålne genstande ("several stolen objects") nested inside it. English builds the same kind of subject, but Danish news pushes the density further and expects the reader to hold the open subject across a long relative clause before the main verb arrives.

The pluperfect: havde meldt

Danish forms the pluperfect with havde (or var) plus the past participle, exactly as English does with "had". It signals a step further back in time than the main narrative past. In our text, the arrest and the stop happen in the simple past (blev anholdt, blev standset), but the owners' phone call to the emergency services happened before all of that — so it gets the pluperfect havde meldt.

The adverb forinden ("beforehand") reinforces the time relationship, but the pluperfect alone already establishes the sequence. This layering of past and pluperfect is how news constructs a timeline without listing dates.

One transfer trap

English speakers reliably misread skal in news headlines as an obligation or a future plan, because that is what "shall" and "must" mean. In a news context, skal + infinitive is usually evidential — a reported claim — not a command.

When you see skal + infinitive in a news story, especially alongside angiveligt, efter sigende, or oplyses det, read it as "is allegedly", not "has to".

Grammar spotlight

This short item exercises the heart of formal written Danish. To go deeper on the structures it uses:

• The two passives that carry the whole register: the -s passive and the passive overview.
• How journalists attribute and hedge: reported speech.
• A parallel nominal-heavy text type to practise on: a job ad and an opinion piece.

Key takeaways