Lably
Skip to content

Danish phonology

Systematic organization of spoken sounds of the Danish language

  • 9 min read
  • 6 chapters

Related on Lably

Through Consonant and Vowel

LabVowels & Consonants

Consonants

Danish has at least 17 consonant phonemes:

  • occur only syllable-initially and only syllable-finally. is phonemically and is the syllable-final allophone of .
  • also occurs syllable-initially in English loans, along with , but syllable-initial is in free variation with and these are not considered part of the phonological inventory of Danish.
  • occurs only after short vowels.
    • It stems morphophonologically, in native words, from or preceding and, in French loans, from a distinct .
    • Beyond morphological boundaries, may also appear as the result of an optional assimilation of before , e.g. han kommer or 'he comes'.
  • are apical alveolar , although some speakers realize dentally ().
  • are voiceless aspirated, with also affricated: .
    • In some varieties of standard Danish (but not the Copenhagen dialect), is just aspirated, without the affrication.
  • are voiceless unaspirated .
    • In syllable codas, weak, partial voicing may accompany them especially when between voiced sounds. In spontaneous speech recorded in 1996, 38% of intervocalic were voiced. In that environment, may be realized as a flap , as in nordisk 'Nordic'.
    • Utterance-final may be realized as , particularly in distinct speech.
  • The plosives are often described as "lenis", i.e. having lesser muscular tension than the "fortis" voiceless stops of other languages.
  • is only weakly fricated. Between vowels, it is often voiced .
  • can be a voiced fricative , but is most often a voiced approximant .
  • – the so-called "soft d" (Danish: blødt d) – is a velarized laminal alveolar approximant .
    • It is acoustically similar to the cardinal vowels and .
    • It is often perceived by non-native speakers of Danish as .
    • Very rarely, can be realized as a fricative.
  • Syllable-initially, is a voiced uvular fricative or, more commonly, an approximant . According to Nina Grønnum, the fricative variant is voiceless . Its precise place of articulation has been described as pharyngeal, though others have specifically described it as "supra-pharyngeal" (that is, above the pharynx, rather than at it). When emphasizing a word, word-initial may be realized as a voiced uvular fricative trill . In syllable-final position, is realized as .
    • The alveolar realization of is very rare. According to Torp (2001), it occurs in some varieties of Jutlandic dialect, and only for some speakers (mostly the elderly). The alveolar realization is considered non-standard, even in classical opera singing – it is probably the only European language in which this is the case. According to Basbøll (2005), it occurs (or used to occur until recently) in very old forms of certain conservative dialects in Northern Jutland and Bornholm.
  • are voiceless after , where the aspiration is realized as devoicing of the following consonant, so that is normally realized as an alveolo-palatal affricate .

A voiced velar continuant occurred distinctively in older Standard Danish. Some older speakers still use it in high register, most often as an approximant . It corresponds to , after back vowels and , and to , after front vowels and , in contemporary Standard Danish.

is elided after , and possibly also after , and less commonly after . Similarly, is elided after , and possibly also after , and less commonly after .

Sign in to keep reading

5 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Language and linguistics

Simplified Chinese charactersStandardized set of Chinese charactersSicIndicates an intentional reproduction in quotationProto-Indo-European languageAncestor of the Indo-European languagesLoanwordWord borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient languageOCLCGlobal library cooperativePhilologyStudy of language in historical sources