Consonants Standard Danish phonology contains nasal, aspirated voiceless and devoiced plosives (labial, alveolar, and velar). Four
voiceless fricatives () are present, as well as four
approximants: . There are also four
approximants, including three regular and one
lateral: . Below is a table depicting the phonemic inventory of Danish and Jutlandic consonants, with phonemes only seen in the dialects of Jutland () in
bold. The most prevalent phonological process in Jutlandic consonants is
lenition, which is the weakening of originally voiceless consonants in either the coda of a syllable or word as well as intervocalically. This process causes voicing as well as the reduction from a
stop to a
fricative and finally to a
sonorant. The final step of lenition is then complete
apocope. This phenomenon can be seen in all its stages in the Jutlandic dialects, although it shows considerably more variability in the alveolars. The bilabials still have the approximant in one dialect, but no
null phoneme and the
velars have no sonorants, only a voiceless stop and fricative. The stages of the lenition as well as which dialects they occur in can be seen in the table below. Multiple possibilities for the same stage are shown separated by a semicolon. In Maps 4.0 and 4.2 the spread of the pronunciation of and are shown. The represents the null or zero morpheme in the maps, the and are and respectively and is the devoiced velar stop while stands for the fricative . Vends and Læsø are regions usually belonging to the Northern Jutlandic dialectal region whereas Fjolds is the border region between Germany and Denmark, normally considered part of
South Jutlandic (). e.g. In Southern Jutlandic, Scandinavian post-vocalic
p, k become word-finally, whereas Standard Danish has
b, g, e.g.
søge 'to seek' = Standard Danish ,
tabe 'lose' = Standard Danish . In the northern part of Southern Jutland, these sounds are voiced fricatives between vowels, i.e. : e.g.
søger 'seeks' = Standard Danish ,
taber 'loses' = Standard Danish .
Vowels Standard Danish has a large vowel inventory and contrasts length on many vowels. Vowels can also be glottalized where the so-called is present and many change their quality depending on whether or not they are preceded or followed by an (phonetically ). Jutlandic exhibits many diphthongs not present in standard Danish. The long stressed mid vowels are diphthongised as respectively in central Jutland and the South Schleswig dialect, e.g. = Standard Danish 'leg', 'farmer' = Standard Danish (<
bōndi). South Jutlandic has the same vowel quality for these vowels, but exhibits a tonal distinction, which is present in place of the Danish . Northern Jutlandic raises them without diphthongising them to respectively. In Hards, a small area of Mid Western Jutland, the vowels become diphthongised with a glide much like in English, and are pronounced as . In Northern Jutland, are also diphthongised in two syllable words with a glide. Northern Jutlandic always has the glide present () and North Western Jutlandic tends towards the glide, but it is not present for all speakers. Long and have been raised to and respectively in northern Jutlandic, e.g. 'said' = Standard Danish , 'go, walk' = Standard Danish . Map 2.2 shows the different possible pronunciations for the standard Danish mid, stressed vowels which is further explained in the following table: Outside of these diphthongs arising from changes in pronunciation from standard Danish long vowels, there are also the following diphthongs: , , , /, / and /. and are both present in Vends, North Western Jutlandic and Mid-Western Jutlandic but only one occurs in Østjysk, South Jutlandic and Southern Jutlandic. There is a tendency towards , but in Mid-Eastern Jutlandic can be found instead. The same sort of alternation is also seen with and . In Mid-Western Jutlandic, Northern Jutlandic and North Western Jutlandic both diphthongs exist. In Mid-Eastern Jutlandic there is an alternation between the two, but each speaker only has one. In Southern Jutlandic and South Jutlandic, only is found. is present as a diphthong in all of Jutland with the exception of the island of Fanø (off of South western Jutland), but has different pronunciations depending on length of the segments. The remaining diphthongs show a distribution based on rounding. In the majority of Jutland the unrounded diphthong is rounded. In South Eastern Jutland the rounded one is unrounded and only in certain parts of Sønderjylland are both diphthongs preserved. Map 2.7 shows the rounding alternation for the front, close diphthong /. An interesting phenomenon in western South Jutlandic and Mid-Western Jutlandic, North Western Jutlandic as well as Northern Jutlandic is the so-called . The can be seen as a modified that only occurs on high vowels (). These long vowels are shortened and then followed by a , or plosive, or in some cases a spirant. (See Map 2.1) In Vends (Northern Jutlandic) and western South Jutlandic the three pronunciations become: , , and and they have the same pronunciation but followed by a schwa if not in the coda. An area in North Western Jutlandic designated on the map as Him-V has instead , and and in Mid-Western Jutlandic it is similar with the also containing a glide and in all three cases a schwa is inserted if it is not in the coda of the syllable. The rest of North Western Jutlandic along the coast has the schwa as well but a fricative instead of a stop, so the sounds are , , and . In the rest of the Jutlandic dialects the vowel quality is overall the same, with gliding in North Western Jutlandic (Han-V and Han-Ø) on the map and only unrounded front vowels in Djurs dialect. ====== As mentioned earlier, the is an alternative of the that occurs only with high vowels. In the other mainland Scandinavian languages as well as South Jutlandic, there are two different tonemes which distinguish between words that were originally one or two syllables. Tone 1 is a simple rising then falling tone in most dialects and tone 2 is more complex, e.g. 'house' = Standard Danish ~ 'houses' = Standard Danish . In standard Danish as well as Jutlandic, tone 1 is replaced with a nonsegmental glottalization and tone 2 disappears entirely. Glottalization can only occur on vowels or sonorants and only in one or two-syllable words and is realized in transcription as . However, in two-syllable words the second syllable must be a derivational morpheme as the historical environment of tone 1 was one-syllable words and tone 2 only occurred on two-syllable words. Due to
apocope and the morphology, both tones and the can now be found on one- and two-syllable words. There can be multiple segments per word, if the word is a compound, which separates its phonetically from the tonemes of
Swedish,
Norwegian and
South Jutlandic, which can only occur once over the whole word. However, in contrast to the standard Danish , the Jutlandic does not usually occur in monosyllabic words with a sonorant + voiceless consonant. Only Djurs dialect and the city dialect of Aarhus have the in this environment. As mentioned before, most of north west Jutland does not have a after short high vowels, and instead has the . The is still present on sonorants and mid and low vowels in the proper environment. Western Jutlandic also has a on the vowel in originally two-syllable words with a geminate voiceless consonant such as , , or e.g. 'cats' = Standard Danish ; 'not' = Standard Danish .
Other phonological characteristics • Jutlandic also exhibits a strong tendency towards apocope, i.e. skipping the
e often found in unstressed syllables, which is itself a weakening of an original
North Germanic -i,
-a or
-u, which causes many words to be distinguished based purely on vowel length or the presence of the
stød. Most unstressed syllables are dropped and in some cases final segments, often {r} e.g.
kaste 'throw' = Standard Danish (Swedish ). • Jutlandic is further known for lacking the diphthong in the first person nominative pronoun . It is pronounced in the majority of Jutland as but in South Jutlandic and North Western Jutlandic as . The difference goes back to different forms in Proto-Norse, namely
ek and
eka, both found in early Runic inscriptions. The latter form has a regular breaking of
e to
ja before an
a in the following syllable. The short form, without breaking, is also found in
Norwegian,
Faroese and
Icelandic. • In Northern Jutlandic
v is a
labiovelar approximant before
back vowels (in the northernmost dialects also before
front vowels), whereas it is a
Labiodental approximant in Standard Danish, e.g.
vaske 'wash' = Standard Danish . The same dialects have voiceless variants of
v and
j in the initial combinations
hj and
hv, e.g.
hvem 'who' = Standard Danish ,
hjerte 'heart' = Standard Danish . • In most parts of Jutland,
nd becomes , e.g.
finde 'find' = Standard Danish . == Grammar ==