Norwegian phonology

The sound system of Norwegian resembles that of Swedish. There is considerable variation among the dialects, and all pronunciations are considered by official policy to be equally correct. The variant generally taught to foreign students is the so-called Standard Eastern Norwegian (Standard Østnorsk), loosely based on the speech of the literate classes of the Oslo area. Despite there being no official standard variety of Norwegian, Standard Østnorsk has traditionally been used in public venues such as theatre and TV, although today local dialects are used extensively in spoken and visual media.

Unless noted otherwise, this article describes the phonology of Standard Eastern Norwegian.

Consonants

 * are partially or fully devoiced to after . In addition, postvocalic  is partially or fully devoiced before.
 * are laminal, either alveolar or denti-alveolar.
 * are aspirated voiceless, whereas are unaspirated voiceless  or partially voiced . After  within the same syllable, only unaspirated voiceless stops occur.
 * is dentalized laminal alveolar or (uncommonly) non-retracted apical alveolar.
 * is in process of changing from laminal denti-alveolar to apical alveolar, which leads to neutralization with the retroflex allophone . Laminal realization is still possible before vowels, after front and close vowels and after consonants that are not coronal, and is obligatory after coronal stops. A velarized laminal  occurs after mid back and open back vowels, sometimes also after . However,  states that at least in Oslo, the laminal variant is not velarized, and the difference is only between an apical and a laminal realization.
 * is an apical alveolar tap . It is occasionally trilled, e.g. in emphatic speech.
 * Retroflex allophones have been variously described as apical alveolar  and apical postalveolar.
 * alternates with in many words, but there is a small number of words in which only  occurs.
 * are velar, whereas is palatal.
 * is labialized after rounded vowels.
 * may be palatal, but is often alveolo-palatal instead. It is unstable in many dialects, and younger speakers in Bergen, Stavanger and Oslo merge  with  into.
 * Glottal stop may be inserted before word-initial vowels. In very emphatic speech, it can also be inserted word-medially in stressed syllables beginning with a vowel.

Most of the retroflex (and postalveolar) consonants are mutations of +any other alveolar/dental consonant; rn >, rt  > , rl  > , rs  > , etc. across word boundaries ("sandhi"), in loanwords and in a group of primarily literary words may be pronounced, e.g., verden , but it may also be pronounced in some dialects. Most of the dialects in Eastern, Central and Northern Norway use the retroflex consonants. Most Southern and Western dialects do not have these retroflex sounds, because in these areas a guttural realization of the phoneme is commonplace, and seems to be expanding. Depending on phonetic context voiceless or voiced uvular fricatives  are used. (See map at right.) Other possible pronunciations include a uvular approximant or, more rarely, a uvular trill. There is, however, a small number of dialects that use both the uvular and the retroflex allophones.

The retroflex flap,, colloquially known to Norwegians as tjukk l ("thick l"), is a Central Scandinavian innovation that exists in Eastern Norwegian (including Trøndersk), the southmost Northern dialects, and the most eastern Western Norwegian dialects. It is supposedly non-existent in most Western and Northern dialects. Today there is doubtlessly distinctive opposition between and  in the dialects that do have, e.g. gard  'farm' and gal  'crazy' in many Eastern Norwegian dialects. Although traditionally an Eastern Norwegian dialect phenomenon, it was considered vulgar, and for a long time it was avoided. Nowadays it is considered standard in the Eastern and Central Norwegian dialects, but is still clearly avoided in high-prestige sociolects or standardized speech. This avoidance calls into question the status of as a phoneme in certain sociolects.

According to the Danish phonetician Nina Grønnum, tjukk l in Trøndersk is actually a postalveolar lateral flap.

Monophthongs
Unless preceding another vowel, all unstressed vowels are short.


 * are open back unrounded . Some older sources describe them as central . states that the central variant of  may be somewhat fronted (closer to ) or retracted (closer to ). For older speakers they can be front.
 * are near-open front unrounded.
 * is mid front unrounded.
 * is front unrounded and has been variously described as close-mid and mid . It is frequently diphthongized to.
 * is rounded and centralized and has been variously described as open-mid and mid.
 * is rounded and centralized and has been variously described as close-mid and mid . It is frequently diphthongized to.
 * is mid central unrounded.
 * is rounded and centralized and has been variously described as near-open and open-mid.
 * is a mid back rounded vowel which can be diphthongized to.
 * is front unrounded, and has been variously described as near-close and close.
 * is a close front unrounded vowel which can be diphthongized to.
 * is near-close rounded and has been variously described as front and near-front.
 * is rounded and has been variously described as close front and near-close near-front . It can be diphthongized to.
 * is rounded and has been variously described as near-close near-front and close central.
 * is close rounded and has been variously described as near-front and central.
 * is rounded and has been variously described as near-close near-back and close back.
 * is a close back rounded vowel which can be diphthongized to.

In almost all other Wikipedia articles the diacritics are omitted. They're shown here for the sake of clarity. is protruded,, whereas and  are compressed, ,.

The phonemic status of long and short in Standard Eastern Norwegian is unclear since it patterns as an allophone of  and  before liquid consonants and approximants, though the introduction of loanwords has created some contrasts before  such as tape  ('tape') vs. sleip  ('slimy') and minimal pairs like hacke  ('to hack', from English) vs. hekke  ('to nest'). only occurs in unstressed syllables.

Diphthongs


Norwegian diphthong phonemes are. Marginal diphthongs are. Their starting and ending points have very similar quality to the short vowels transcribed the same way.


 * appears only in the word hui.
 * appear only in loanwords.
 * is used only by some younger speakers, who contrast it with . Speakers who do not have in their diphthong inventory replace it with.
 * The ending point may be realized as, especially in emphatic pronunciation.
 * The offset of is often realized as a labiodental approximant, which turns this diphthong into a sequence.
 * In case of the diphthongs and, some scholars describe their ending points as rounded, i.e..

analyses Norwegian diphthongs as sequences of a short vowels and a semivowel or  (the latter corresponds to central, not back ). On the other hand, both and  analyze them as diphthongs.

Accent
Norwegian is a pitch accent language with two distinct pitch patterns. They are used to differentiate two-syllable words with otherwise identical pronunciation. For example in most Norwegian dialects, the word "bønder" (farmers) is pronounced using tone 1, while "bønner" (beans or prayers) uses tone 2. Though the difference in spelling occasionally allow the words to be distinguished in written language, in most cases the minimal pairs are written alike, since written Norwegian has no explicit accent marks.

There are significant variations in the realization of the pitch accent between dialects. In most of Eastern Norway, including the capital Oslo, the so-called low pitch dialects are spoken. In these dialects, accent 1 uses a low flat pitch in the first syllable, while accent 2 uses a high, sharply falling pitch in the first syllable and a low pitch in the beginning of the second syllable. In both accents, these pitch movements are followed by a rise of intonational nature (phrase accent), the size (and presence) of which signals emphasis/focus and which corresponds in function to the normal accent in languages that lack lexical tone, such as English. That rise culminates in the final syllable of an accentual phrase, while the fall to utterance-final low pitch that is so common in most languages is either very small or absent.

On the other hand, in most of western and northern Norway (the so-called high-pitch dialects) accent 1 is falling, while accent 2 is rising in the first syllable and falling in the second syllable or somewhere around the syllable boundary. The two tones can be transcribed on the first vowel as for accent 1 and  for accent 2; the modern reading of the IPA (low and falling) corresponds to eastern Norway, whereas an older tradition of using diacritics to represent the shape of the pitch trace (falling and rising-falling) corresponds to western Norway.

The pitch accents (as well as the peculiar phrase accent in the low-tone dialects) give the Norwegian language a "singing" quality which makes it fairly easy to distinguish from other languages. Interestingly, accent 1 generally occurs in words that were monosyllabic in Old Norse, and accent 2 in words that were polysyllabic.

Tonal accents and morphology
In many dialects, the accents take on a significant role in marking grammatical categories. Thus, the ending (T1)—en implies determinate form of a masculine monosyllabic noun (båten, bilen, (den store) skjelven), whereas (T2)-en denotes either determinate form of a masculine bisyllabic noun or an adjectivised noun/verb ((han var) skjelven, moden). Similarly, the ending (T1)—a denotes feminine singular determinate monosyllabic nouns (boka, rota) or neutrum plural determinate nouns (husa, lysa), whereas the ending (T2)—a denotes the preterite of weak verbs (rota, husa), feminine singular determinate bisyllabic nouns (bøtta, ruta, jenta).

In compound words
In a compound word, the pitch accent is lost on one of the elements of the compound (the one with weaker or secondary stress), but the erstwhile tonic syllable retains the full length (long vowel or geminate consonant) of a stressed syllable.

Monosyllabic tonal accents
In some dialects of Norwegian, mainly those from Nordmøre and Trøndelag to Lofoten, there may also be tonal opposition in monosyllables, as in ('car') vs.  ('axe'). In a few dialects, mainly in and near Nordmøre, the monosyllabic tonal opposition is also represented in final syllables with secondary stress, as well as double tone designated to single syllables of primary stress in polysyllabic words. In practice, this means that one gets minimal pairs like: ('the rooster') vs.  ('get him inside');  ('in the well') vs.  ('her well');  ('sheriff') vs.  ('the sheriff'). Amongst the various views on how to interpret this situation, the most promising one may be that the words displaying these complex tones have an extra mora. This mora may have little or no effect on duration and dynamic stress, but is represented as a tonal dip.

Other dialects with tonal opposition in monosyllabic words have done away with vowel length opposition. Thus, the words ('dare') vs.  ('cradle') have merged into  in the dialect of Oppdal.

Loss of tonal accents
Some forms of Norwegian have lost the tonal accent opposition. This includes mainly parts of the area around (but not including) Bergen; the Brønnøysund area; to some extent, the dialect of Bodø; and, also to various degrees, many dialects between Tromsø and the Russian border. Faroese and Icelandic, which have their main historical origin in Old Norse, also show no tonal opposition. It is, however, not clear whether these languages lost the tonal accent or whether the tonal accent was not yet there when these languages started their separate development. Danish (apart from some southern dialects) and Finland Swedish also have no tonal opposition.

Pulmonic ingressive
The word ja "yes" is sometimes pronounced with inhaled breath (pulmonic ingressive) in Norwegian—and this can be rather confusing for foreigners. The exact same phenomenon occurs in Danish, Icelandic and Swedish too, and can also be found in German and Finnish.

Sample
The sample text is a reading of The North Wind and the Sun by a 47-year-old professor from Oslo's Nordstrand district.

Orthographic version
Nordavinden og solen kranglet om hvem av dem som var den sterkeste. Da kom det en mann gående med en varm frakk på seg. De blei enige om at den som først kunne få mannen til å ta av seg frakken skulle gjelde for den sterkeste av dem. Så blåste nordavinden av all si makt, men jo mer han blåste, jo tettere trakk mannen frakken rundt seg, og til sist måtte nordavinden gi opp. Da skinte solen fram så godt og varmt at mannen straks måtte ta av seg frakken. Og så måtte nordavinden innrømme at solen var den sterkeste av dem.