Danish language

Danish (dansk) is one of the North Germanic languages, a sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany where it holds the status of minority language.

Danish is also taught as a compulsory foreign language in schools in Iceland. There are also Danish language communities in Argentina, Greenland (where it was a mandatory subject in schools until 2009), the U.S., and Canada.

The sound system of Danish is in many ways unique among the world's languages. It is prone to considerable reduction and assimilation of both consonants and vowels even in very formal standard language. A rare feature is the presence of a prosodic feature called stød, which is a form of laryngealization or creaky voice, only occasionally realized as a full glottal stop. Stød generally occurs in words that have "accent 1" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were monosyllabic in Old Norse, while no-stød occurs in words that have "accent 2" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were polysyllabic in Old Norse.

Unlike the neighboring Continental Scandinavian languages, the prosody of Danish does not have phonemic pitch. Stress is phonemic and distinguishes words such as billigst ['bilist] "cheapest" and bilist [bi'list] "car driver".

Modern Standard Danish has 20 vowel phonemes. All except two of these vowels may be either long and short, with the exceptions being schwa and /ɐ/. The long and short realizations often differ in quality and there are several allophones that differ if they occur together with an /r/. For example, /ø/ is lowered when it occurs before or after /r/ and /a/ is pronounced [æ] when it is long.

/b, d, ɡ/ are devoiced in all contexts. /ʋ, ð/ often have slight frication, but are usually pronounced as approximants. The distinction between /pʰ/~/b/, /tˢ/~/d/ and /kʰ/~/ɡ/ is only made in the beginning of a word or a stressed syllable. The combination of /sj/ is realized as an alveolo-palatal fricative, [ɕ], making it possible to postulate a tentative /ɕ/-phoneme in Danish. /r/ can be described as "tautosyllabic", i.e., it takes the form of either a phonetic consonant or vowel. At the beginning of a word or after a consonant, it is pronounced as a uvular fricative, [ʁ], but in most other positions it is either realised as a non-syllabic low central vowel, [ɐ̯], or simply coalesces with the preceding vowel. The phenomenon is also comparable to non-rhotic pronunciations of English. This pronunciation of r in Danish distinguishes it from Norwegian and Swedish, which use trilled /r/, and makes it sound to speakers of those languages as if Danes speak with a German accent.

Information: Wikipedia