Danish pronunciation, regional or otherwise

[galingale]

The recent post about Denmark got me remembering...  Can someone point me to a place where I can find Danish pronunciation examples online?  How about regional pronunciations?

A Danish friend comes from a part of the country where many consonants are only faintly pronounced.  He demonstrated his grandparents' rural pronunciation with the Dansk

Comments

[dan_lian]

Hi, I'm not sure about a place online, but I can tell you that where I learned to speak Danish (Holte, just north of Copenhagen) gave me a noted accent. Evidently Holte people speak the equivalent of Queen's Danish (or so I was told by folks). Rather than "Hol-te", I say "Haalte", and tweak my vowels accordingly. It's an interesting observation. I also know that my classmates would tell me how "lucky" I was not to be on Bornholm or Jylland, because they "don't speak properly" out there and how people from around Copenhagen/on Sjaelland can sometimes need a translator to understand the rural speakers.

Mind you, I never went to either Jylland or Bornholm so I can't assert to the differences, but that was what my classmates in 'high school' from 1999-2000 told the wee exchange student.

[galingale]

Neat. I'd previously heard of this happening with English--someone from California became an impromptu translator at a conference because an attendee from Scotland couldn't understand an attendee from the Bronx. But they'd been fine when exchanging emails beforehand!

[shorofsky]

Hi there, I am from Jylland and can tell you that you were subject to some quite mean generalisations about the Danish language.

There is a lingual rivalry in Denmark... Over here in Jylland we make fun of the way people from Sjælland talk. We don't tend to like the way it sounds, actually, just like they don't like the way we talk.

However, they were exaggerating the difficulty they experience when "travelling abroad". There is a lot less difference between the way we speak in Jylland and the way they speak over on Djævleøen than there was in the past.

[dan_lian]

"The devil island", eh? :)

I figured that there had to be some exaggerations--these were gymnasium students, after all, and with an impressionable American in their midst, who could resist the fun? -- but I did hear some generalizations from adults as well. I figured it was similar to the way we Northern American speakers (gently) harass the Southerners. Not drastic, but if you weren't expecting it, you could run into issues.

[ein_wunderkind]

This site is great for learning Danish, esp. for hearing/listening to pronunciation:

http://www.speakdanish.dk/

[caprinus]

Jylland (=Jutland) has several rural areas with dialects markedly different from the standard. I could be wrong, but I think I remember something like your friend's pronunciation as being Nordjysk, from north of Aalborg; "a huj uj" being the local sound for "er hunden ond?" (is the dog aggressive?).

But don't take my word for it, I am not native and it's been a while since I heard it.

[caprinus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_language#Dialects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Danishdialectmap.png <-- on this map, the variant I remember would have been marked as "N".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jutlandic has a discussion of phonology.

[shorofsky]

Your transcription looks more like the question "Is the dog out?" than is it aggressive.

Here's an example of how different the western dialect is from the copenhagen one.

A few years ago I was at home with my parents having dinner in the garden when two Scottish people on bikes came by to ask for direction. Instead of needing me to translate from Danish into English Dad just spoke to them in his normal Danish dialect and the two understood each other perfectly. they stayed for dinner, actually. that would not work if the same two Scots had ventured out on bikes in copenhagen...

[laudre]

I can't really help with the Dansk, but this accent description sounds exactly like some American English regional accents I've heard. A lower-class accent I've heard from the Hampton Roads region of Virginia has a similar apparent lack of consonants -- stops often fade into fricatives or nasals, or are glided over entirely, becoming consonantless transitions between vowel sounds. "Bottle," for instance, sounds like a two-syllable pronunciation of the world "ball."

[kjell_bjarne]

From the perspective of a norwegian speaker, I must admit that danish sounds sonewhat similar to your description to me. It's strange, because a lot of consonants that are soft in norwegian are hard in danish, and quite often the reverse is true. Confusing as hell for me. And when I'm in Aalborg visiting my friend (north jutland), I tend to have to imagine the consonants and/or the second half of a word. They tend to give up halfway through a word, or at least that's how it seems to me:)

[pne]

So North Jutlandish is to Norwegian as French is to Spanish, perhaps -- French is also famous for not pronouncing the second half of words -- for example, "aiment" being pronounced simply "em".