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.
Consonants[]
In distinct pronunciation it is possible to distinguish at least 20 consonants in most variants of Danish:
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar, uvular |
Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | [ŋ] | |||
| Plosive | aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | [t͡ɕ] | kʰ | |
| unaspirated | p | t | k | |||
| Continuant | voiceless | f | s | [ɕ] | h | |
| voiced | v | [ð] | j | r | ||
| lateral | l | |||||
| Vocoid | [ʊ̯] | [ɪ̯] | [ɐ̯] | |||
Vowels[]
| Front | Central | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| unrounded | rounded | |||
| Close | i | y | u | |
| Close-mid | e | ø | o | |
| Mid | ɛ | œ | ə | ɔ |
| Open | a | |||