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. Stick around and subscribe for language.
Similar things happen with Thai and Lao. As a Thai speaker I always find Laotians talk as if they came straight from the 1700s. Even the Lao script looks like an ancient handwritten version of Thai even when its on the screen.
As a Dane, I always love watching videos like this. Sometimes I really wish that it was possible for me to hear what we Danes sound like to non-Danish speakers, because even though I’m familiar with the “potato in the throat”-joke, I just cannot hear it myself, I think we sound great, haha!
excuse me what the fuck?
Thanks for sharing this! :) As a Swedish-speaker I have always thought Danish sounds funny (and I'm familiar with the joke about Danes "speaking with a potato in their throat"), so this little history lesson was very interesting to me. I find that Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are all otherwise 95% mutually intelligible, but when Danish is spoken, I have to reeeally concentrate to understand 50% of it.
As a Spanish speaker I have to say something similar happens with Portuguese, specially with Portuguese from Portugal.
When I hear European Portuguese it sounds like if this was a very drunk Russian person who is trying to speak Spanish but fails really bad at speaking it 😂 they have all these SH sounds so it feels like if they are eating something or like if they have a potato in their mouths just like Danes.
As result, I end up not being able to understand anything but a few words here and there. On the other hand, when I read Portuguese incredibly enough I can understand around 90% of what's written but there are a lot of words and expressions that are said in a very funny way and sometimes it feels like a dialect that comes from Spanish.
If I were to describe the sound of Danish, as a non-scandinavian, I'd say it sounds like the cockneyest cockney English ever. I feel like if you turn the cockney meter a ton up on an already super-cockney londoner you'll get Danish, that's the impression I've always had of the language
I thought this was gonna be kamelåså
Danish sounds the nicest to me. That said I'm an exceptionally lazy English speaker. I like it's lack of hard consonants.
What is the opinion of this guy within a less general audience more linguistics lovers mind. Is he pretty good?