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Danish phonology


The phonology of Danish is similar to that of the other Scandinavian languages such as Swedish and Norwegian, but it also has distinct features setting it apart from the phonologies of its most closely related languages. For example Danish has a suprasegmental feature known as stød which is a kind of laryngeal phonation that is used phonemically. It also exhibits extensive lenition of plosives, which is noticeably more common than in the neighboring languages. Because of that and a few other things, spoken Danish is rather hard to understand for Norwegians and Swedes, although they can easily read it.

In distinct pronunciation it is possible to distinguish at least 20 consonants in most variants of Danish:

[ʊ̯] after back vowels

The Danish allophones can be analyzed into 15 distinctive consonant phonemes, /p t k b d ɡ m n f s h v j r l/, where /p t k d ɡ v j r/ have different pronunciation in syllable onset vs. syllable coda.

Instances of [ŋ] can be analyzed as /n/ as it only occurs before /ɡ/ or /k/ and isn't contrasting with [n]. This makes it unnecessary to postulate an /ŋ/-phoneme in Danish.

The vowel system is unstable, and the contemporary spoken language is experiencing a merger of more of these phonemes. The following vowel pairs may be merged:

The following vowels are allophones. Phonemes are discussed below.

[ə] and [ɐ] occur only in unstressed syllables. With the exception of [a], [ʌ], [ə] and [ɐ] all vowels may be either long and short. Long vowels may have stød, thus making it possible to distinguish 30 different vowels in stressed syllables. However, vowel length and stød are most likely features of the syllable rather than features of the vowel.


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