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According to Wikipedia,

Liaison (French pronunciation: ​[ljɛ.zɔ̃]) is the pronunciation of a latent word-final consonant immediately before a following vowel sound.

Scandinavian languages like Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish tend to drop final consonant sounds in speech, but do they experience liaisons when spoken?

For instance in Swedish: Jag is typically pronounced as Ja, but would Jag är be pronounced as Ja gär?

Does this happen in all Scandinavian languages? Is there any literature regarding this?

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  • Are you telling us that you know as a matter of fact that [g] is pronounced in the phrase, in Swedish? Or are you asking "and is <jag är> pronounced [jɑ ar]?".
    – user6726
    Jun 8, 2016 at 15:23
  • @user6726 The latter. I'm a beginning learner of Swedish, so most of my exposure to the language has been ceremoniously hyper-enunciated. I'm interested to know if liaisons occur in Swedish (and other Scandinavian languages).
    – erip
    Jun 8, 2016 at 15:45

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As far as I know, the unpronounced citation consonants of are not ever recovered phrasally before a vowel. There is the puzzle of knowing which orthographic consonants are unpronounced (Norwegian [rø] "red", Swedish [rød], but note that even before a vowel suffix, the is gone in Norwegian ([røeste] "reddest"). I cannot parse Danish consonants, and I'd suggest consulting Basbøl's book if you want to know how that stuff is pronounced.

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  • I agree. I can think of no instances of liaison in any Scandinavian language, either—including Danish. The only possible example I can think of is that han ‘he’ and hun ‘she’ nearly always lose their final /n/ before a consonant in rapid speech in Danish, but only facultatively before vowels. In slower or more careful speech, though, they don’t lose their nasal at all.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Jun 14, 2016 at 22:43
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Liaison exists in Danish but only in few words by inflections and word formation.

e.g.

mand [ma̝nˀ] "man" > mandig [ma̝ndi] "manly"

valg [va̝lˀ] "choice" > valget [va̝ljð̠ˠ̞] "the choice"

valg is also sometimes heard as [ˈvalˀj], implying the j is not yet totally latent.

Such rules have a certain universality, i.e. < nd > + -ig and the latent j which is pronounced followed by such an ending.

It is also worth to mention that a [k] can appear after [ŋ], because this may exist in other languages but often ignored. An experiment below shows that the [k] is latent. Some participants were asked to add a verbalization suffix -ere, which starts with a vowel, to a word ending with < ng > [ŋ], to form a new word. Most participants add a [k], so [pɛŋˀ] becomes [pɛŋkeːˀɐ] with the ending. This case is pretty as similar as the mentioned example of < nd >.

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