Stød

[3] Danish linguists such as Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, Nina Grønnum and Hans Basbøll have generally considered stød to be a suprasegmental phenomenon related to phonation and accent.

[8] Following an earlier suggestion by Ito and Mester, Riad (2003) analyzes stød as a surface manifestation of an underlying high–low tone pattern across two syllables.

Riad traces the history of stød to a tonal system similar to that found in the contemporary Swedish dialects of Mälardalen, particularly that of Eskilstuna.

A 2013 study by Grønnum, Vazquez-Larruscaín and Basbøll, however, found that the tonal hypothesis was unable to successfully account for the distribution of stød.

In this analysis, the notion of stød-basis is unnecessary, and the only thing that needs to be accounted for are those cases where syllables that ought to carry stød according to the model, in fact do not, e.g. words like øl, 'beer', and ven, 'friend'.

Basbøll accounts for these by positing that the final sonorants in these cases are extraprosodic, meaning that they are simply not counting towards the moraic weight of the syllable to which they belong.

This accounts for the resurfacing of stød when such words are followed by a syllabic consonant such as the definite suffix (e.g. vennen [ˈvenˀn̩], 'the friend' ), but not when they are followed by a syllable with a vowel (e.g. venner [ˈvenɐ], 'friends').

Der till medh: sa wferdas de icke heller att talla som annat folck, uthan tryckia ordhen fram lika som the willia hosta, och synas endeles medh flitt forwendhe ordhen i strupan, for sen de komma fram ... Also this: nor do they stoop ('worthy themselves') to speak like other people, but press the words forward as if they will cough, and appear partly to deliberately turn the words around in the throat, before they come forward... Danish must have had stød already in the 16th century as a speech against the Danes by a Swedish bishop, Hemming Gadh, quoted by Johannes Magnus, mentions a particular guttural cough associated with Danish.

But some scholars have suggested that it goes back to the original population groups and that the line between stød and non-stød dialects represent an ancient invasion from the south.

[14] Stød was first mentioned in the 1743 second treatise on orthography of Jens Pedersen Høysgaard, where he described it as stop of the breath caused by the closing of the pharynx.