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Sarah Lund works one murder across twenty episodes, in the same jumper throughout. The series that started the British appetite for subtitled Nordic crime.

A minor party leader becomes prime minister by accident and finds out what the job costs. More poignant now than when it aired, and the political register is clearly articulated.

A body on the Øresund Bridge, half in each country, hands Martin Rohde and Saga Norén one case between two forces. Each speaks their own language throughout, and neither side switches.

Rita Madsen teaches primary school with rather more contempt for the parents than for the children, and no filter at all. Fast, sweary, contemporary spoken Danish.

Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen play worse versions of themselves and make every situation worse. Largely improvised, so the dialogue is unrehearsed conversational Danish rather than written lines.

A Netflix production, adapting the Sveistrup novel in Danish with the plot largely intact. Procedural dialogue, so the vocabulary narrows fast once you are a few episodes in.

A Copenhagen hospital haunted by more than it admits, shot on grainy video with a running Danish-Swedish feud at its centre. A third season arrived in 2022, twenty-five years after the second.

A Netflix series from Nicolas Winding Refn. Miu moves through a neon Copenhagen underworld with a gift nobody names, and whole scenes carry no dialogue at all.

A DR Ramasjang cartoon about a man with an uncontrollably long penis, which earned Denmark a week of international headlines in 2021. Slow narration, small vocabulary, and very Danish.

Full episodes free in the Danish playlist on LEGO's own channel, dubbed rather than written in Danish, so the speech is scripted, slow and clearly enunciated. Lars Mikkelsen voices Master Wu in the film.

DR's current affairs on YouTube, made for the audience that stopped watching broadcast television. Unscripted and quick, in the register a textbook will not teach you.

DR's YouTube format about bodies and health, aimed at teenagers. Plain spoken Danish on the subjects people actually discuss, which is not the set a course book covers.

Two hosts take a case each, every Monday since 2018, and only ever ones old enough that no immediate family is left. Conversational rather than scripted, with written notes for every episode.

Four schoolteachers test a theory that people are born with half a per mille too little alcohol in the blood. Mads Mikkelsen, and it took Best International Feature in 2021.

A kindergarten teacher is accused of something he did not do and a small town makes up its mind inside a week. Mikkelsen again, and he took Best Actor at Cannes for it.

Refn's Copenhagen drug trilogy, with Mads Mikkelsen as Tonny in the first two. Handheld, shouted, and heavy on the street slang no course book carries.

Lise is fourteen and bound for school when her mother's labour turns dangerous, and one day decides the rest of her life. Adapted from Marie Bregendahl's En dødsnat.

Copenhagen in 1933. Maren dances to jazz too late and too often, and the state sends her to Sprogø, the island where women judged morally defective were kept until 1961.

Dogme 95 number two. A commune goes out in public pretending to be disabled to see what happens, filmed on handheld video with no score and no lighting.

Two elderly sisters in a Jutland village take in a French refugee, who eventually cooks them one dinner. From a Karen Blixen story, and the first Danish film to take an Oscar.

Dreyer's 1955 film of the Kaj Munk play, in which a Jutland farming family argues about faith until something settles it. Formal, stage-derived Danish, and it took the Golden Lion at Venice.