Scandinavian languages Danish In Danish, the informal second-person singular is and the formal form of address uses the third-person plural , capitalized to distinguish it from its other use. The second-person plural and the third-person singular ("he") or ("she") were sometimes used until the early 19th century in standard Danish and awhile longer in the countryside. The German-inspired form entered Danish in the 18th century, too late to enter liturgical use. In church, as in rural or dialect-speaking areas, has always been the universal form, especially in Jutland. As in other Scandinavian languages, even among the prestige dialects, the formal pronoun is waning in use—in the case of Danish, since ("The Youth Revolts") during and after the protests of 1968. As a general rule, the informal is accepted everywhere today, except when addressing royalty or during military service. In other contexts, it has come to seem excessively formal and old-fashioned to most Danes. Even at job interviews and among parliamentarians, has become standard. In written Danish, remains current in legal, legislative, and formal business documents, as well as in some translations from other languages. This is sometimes audience-dependent, as in the Danish government's general use of except in healthcare information directed towards the elderly, where is still used. Other times, it is maintained as an affectation, as by the staff of some formal restaurants, the newspaper, TV 2 announcers, and the avowedly conservative Maersk corporation. Attempts by other corporations to avoid sounding either stuffy or too informal by employing circumlocutions—using passive phrasing or using the pronoun ("one")—have generally proved awkward and been ill-received, and (with the notable exception of the national railway DSB) most have opted for the more personable form. Icelandic Modern Icelandic is the Scandinavian dialect closest to Old Norse, which made a distinction between the plural and the dual . This distinction continued in written Icelandic the early 1920 when the plural was also used on formal occasions. The formal usage of seems to have pushed the dual to take over the plural so modern Icelandic normally uses as a plural. However, in formal documents such as by the president is still used as plural, and the usage of as plural and as dual is still retained in the Icelandic translation of the Christian scriptures. There are still a number of fixed expressions—particularly religious adages such as "seek and ye shall find" ()—and the formal pronoun is