Danish sounds odd.
Like a throat condition.
Like Danes are holding back a cough.
Or maybe they got a potato stuck in their throats.
Apparently... at least, that's what everyone's telling me.
But why?
Why does Danish sound so funny to people?
I recently explored how Swedes, Norwegians and Danes can all communicate without having
to switch languages.
But this wasn't fair and even – some languages were more intelligible than others.
The internet eagerly pointed its finger at one language in particular: Danish did it.
I post a video and I'm told that Danish is a throat condition.
I log into social media, and I read about the potato in their throat.
I go visit a discussion board, and it's a "strangled goose".
A study tells me Swedish kids hear Danish as uglier and stranger than Danes do Swedish.
Sure, some of this is "banter" and "good-natured teasing".
But even taking it all with a grain of salty herring, I still have to ask: what makes Danish
sound so funny?
Maybe I could just add my own theory.
I'll blame it on too much Danish butter in their kringler.
But no, this is NativLang, so you already know what we're about to do: sift through
the history of Danish to uncover what specifically about its pronunciation makes it stand out.
Now, Danish is notoriously hard to learn to pronounce.
You'll hear me try, but somebody please back me up.
("Rødgrød med fløde".)
Whew, ok!
Travel back in time, once upon a 1300 years ago.
Denmark was speaking an Indo-European Germanic language with a unique Northern flavor,
which we call Old Norse.
To them it's the "dǫnsk tunga", the Danetongue.
Throughout Scandinavia, this is a time of unity.
Everywhere you go, Norse sounds like Norse.
But soon these Danetonguers grow restless and get upgraded to Viking status.
In the Viking Age, something will change.
It starts in Denmark.
A Dane, probably many Danes but definitely this one, decides, "I'm going to say my vowels
differently", which leads East Norse to split away from West Norse.
It's the start of a trend, the perfect setup for the rest of our story: Hey, everybody,
there was another sound change in Denmark!
And at this point, over a thousand years ago, we can officially call it "Danmǫrk", the
Dane march.
See, this runestone says so.
The Vikings settle down.
The Middle Ages settle in.
At this point, Scandinavia is a continuum of dialects that smoothly trace their origins
to East and West Norse.
Oh, and the too often forgotten Old Gutnish on its own island, where vowels sometimes
didn't agree with either Norse, West or East.
Officially though, this is an era of Latin.
Not too much written Norse.
Until Denmark decides to go medieval and ink the Scanian Law.
Thanks to scribal copying this law was available in multiple versions, including this awesome
one in Runes.
Its words show off another Danish change: unstressed vowels are getting weaker.
This is how your nicely distinguished endings in Swedish and Norwegian will all end up in
Danish with /ə/, /ə/, /ə/!
Meanwhile, the Hanseatic League is uniting to dominate the continent's northern coast,
which brings a war and many new words from Middle Low German.
Or Middle-nether-dutch.
Hah.
Also meanwhile, another change is happening in Denmark: consonants becoming softer, like
how [t] softened to [ð] in /matr/ to [mað].
This is lenition.
It's a normal change (just ask Spanish), but, weirdly, Danes do it at the end of syllables.
Consonants and unstressed vowels are weakening, but stressed vowels are multiplying.
By count, Danish will end up with more distinct vowels than maybe any other language.
Now this is a Danish that's getting different.
We're onto something.
But on the "sounds funny" scale, so far I'd rate it a "chuckle".
So far.
It's 1526.
A Swede writes that Danes sound "like they want to cough", "turn[ing] words in their
throats", "writhing and wringing".
What is this throatiness?
We won't know for another two centuries, before a Danish grammarian writes in the
Concordia res parvæ crescunt...
(Hey at least my Latin works – also, bold title.)
Well, this book describes how Danes pronounce many syllables with "a very little hiccup".
A little hiccup with a bold name: a punch, push, shock, or blast is a "stød".
This punch to the throat isn't one sound.
It sums up an entire process.
A complicated process with multiple phases and a bunch of anatomy happening in your throat.
It's not on every syllable either.
These don't have it: "tåre", "gøre".
These ones do: "sår", "dør".
It's been called creaky, cough-like and, let's not forget, a constant stream of tiny hiccups.
And it is crucial if you ever want to master that genuine Danish accent.
At the very moment this author's writing about hiccups, there's another sound change in Denmark.
This time for once though it's not Danish's fault.
Danish preserved a trilled Norse R. But now, throughout France and Germany a new R is spreading,
a dramatic change worth its own story, the so-called guttural R. Instead of a front-of-the-tongue
trill /r/ it's a back-of-the-mouth /ʁ/.
Denmark caught a bad case of this bug, whose symptoms include turning words like /rœðgrœð/
into, uh, this: [ˈʁœðˀˌɡ̊ʁœðˀ].
The result is an even throatier Danish.
We're almost there.
Almost, because they have all the right sounds... in Copenhagen.
But Scandinavia is a rich tapestry of dialects.
Sweden will keep its many variants, including a Swedified form of Gutnish.
In Norway, there's still no single spoken Norwegian.
But back in Denmark, the old dialects, some of which never even had that stød, will witness
one last change: traditional dialects will mostly vanish.
We end up with nearly all of Denmark speaking one language, a language with the simplest
grammatical endings in Scandinavia, weakened consonants, perhaps the largest number of
vowels in the world, and little hiccups and /ʁ/s.
And that is how the Danes went from speaking Norse just as well as anybody to sounding
amazingly odd.
Or oddly amazing.
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