Danish vowels — scratching the recent surface in a phonological experiment

Abstract

The paper presents the outcome of some very recent changes in the pronunciation of standard Danish vowels, changes which add to the already considerable inventory of surface vowel contrasts. It claims that a classical structuralist phonological account of the vowel inventory is not descriptively adequate. The only reasonable abstract representation is a morphophonological one whose putative psychological reality is at least not contradicted by the results of a phonological experiment.