Word stress is all about on which syllables to focus… But don’t get stressed about it! 🙂 (Photo courtesy of mitchell haindfield at Flickr, CC License.)

If you want to talk with the natives, you have to hit an udtale [OOTHtahleh] (pronunciation) that is not too far off. 🙂 Of course, having a bit of accent is okay, as long as people don’t need to guess whether you meant hat or head. Stress is one of those little details that do matter in this respect. (While alle [AL-eh] means ”everybody”, allé [aLEH] means ”avenue”…)

Many Danish words are stressed on the first syllable:

SOfa, FLASke, MENNeske, Eventyr, HEMMelig (sofa, bottle, human being, fairytale, secret)

Of course, it’s hard to tell if one-syllable words are stressed on the first or last syllable:

GRÆS, SNE, SØ (grass, snow, lake) 😉

Small grammatical words that don’t really refer to a lot in the outside world, often get no stress at all: Hans og Grethe ka’ li’ at gå tur i parken. (Hans and Grethe like to take a stroll in the park.)

Then there is a number of prefixes that tend to lose their stress, including be-, ge- and for-. (Prefixes are ”semi-words” that are put in front of other words to change their meaning, like ”pre-” in prepaid.) As a result, the words they front end up getting stressed on the second syllable:

at beSØGe (to visit), beTALing (payment), geVÆR (gun), geVINST (profit), at forSTÅ (to understand), forÆLDre (parents), forNUFTig (reasonable)

(Of course there are undtagelser, exceptions, like FORår, springtime.)

Other prefixes keep their stress, while the words they’re attached to also retain a bit of theirs:

MIStanke (suspicion), Ulykke (accident), UDmærket (outstanding)

Yes, you maybe guessed it – when words are jammed together to create new words (compounding), the main stress usually lands on the first syllable, while the other original stresses remain as ”secondary stresses” (pronounced a bit more forcefully than entirely unstressed parts of the word):

FLYTTedag, LASTbil, MENNeskerettigheder (”moving-in day”, truck, human rights)

Finally, many everyday words are stressed on the (second-)last syllable. That’s because they were originally taken from other languages. You just have to learn them by heart. 🙂

milJØ, chaufFØR [shaw-FUR], banAN, benZIN, staTION [sta-SHAWN], turIST, minerAL, geograFI, chokoLAde, banDAge [ban-DASH-eh], faMIlie (evironment, driver, banana, petrol/gasoline, station, tourist, mineral, geography, chocolate, bandage, family)

Sometimes this special stress is marked by the letter é: idé, café (idea, café)

Fun fact: Part of the reason why Danish pronunciation can be so hard, is that Danes put so little effort into unstressed syllables that they often become reduced or even disappear. For example koppen (the cup) is often pronounced ”kobm”, while uge (week) is reduced to ”u’” [oo]. 🙂