Laravel localization in Danish Dansk

Locale codes

Set the base locale in config/app.php. For regional variants, Danish commonly uses: da_DK, da_GL

// config/app.php
'locale' => 'da',
'fallback_locale' => 'en',

// Or switch at runtime
App::setLocale('da');

Plural rules: what Danish actually needs

CLDR defines 2 cardinal categories for Danish. The sample numbers below were computed by ICU for this exact locale:

Laravel's trans_choice() maps numbers to 2 pipe-separated forms for this locale:

// lang/da/messages.php
'items' => ':count item|:count items'

// Usage
trans_choice('messages.items', $count, ['count' => $count]);

Try any number live in the pluralization tester.

Localized dates with Carbon

Real output for Danish (da locale), generated by Carbon for March 21, 2026:

$date = now()->locale('da');

$date->translatedFormat('l, j F Y');
// "lørdag, 21 marts 2026"

$date->isoFormat('LLLL');
// "lørdag d. 21. marts 2026 kl. 14:30"

$date->isoFormat('L');
// "21.03.2026"

$date->subDays(3)->diffForHumans();
// "for 3 måneder siden"

What to watch out for in Danish

• Definite article is a suffix (bogen = "the book"), so "the {noun}" patterns do not map one-to-one.
• Two grammatical genders (common and neuter) affect articles and adjective endings.
• Informal du is standard in modern UI copy; the formal De is rare.
• Decimal comma with dot as thousands separator (1.234,56); dates are written dd.mm.yyyy.

Framework strings already translated

Laravel's own validation, auth and pagination strings are maintained in Danish by the open-source Laravel-Lang project (MIT). Install them, then manage your app's own strings live:

composer require laravel-lang/common --dev
php artisan lang:add da
php artisan lang:update