Vowels make it difficult to study Danish

There is harder to build vocabulary for Danish children, than children of the same age from other countries. A recent study by the University of Southern Denmark, confirms this fact and provides a possible explanation for why languages ​​can be harder or easier to learn.

 

When Danish children reach the age of eighteen months, they realize significantly fewer words than children of the same age from other countries. For example, young Danes of one year old know about 80 words, while the Swedish children the same age know about 150 words.  When they are two years  old, their vocabulary catching up with children of the same age from other countries.

"A lot of vowels indicates that the Danish children is more difficult to understand the structure of the speech of their parents than children from other countries. This makes the Danish language is more difficult to study,"- says Dorthe Bleses, director of the Center of Children's Language at the University of Southern Denmark.

All languages ​​that have many vowel sounds are difficult to study. The international study conducted by the example of seven languages, showed that the consonants have a special role for the understanding of words.

Researchers at Children's Language Center at the University of Southern Denmark found that Croatian children, for example, have a much larger vocabulary than Danish children of the same age. The researchers attributed this to the fact that the Croatian has only 9 vowels and 23 consonants, while in the Danish language are 22 different vowel sounds (including vowels and semivowels) and only 17 consonants.

When the language of many vowel sounds, single words blend together and sound like one. In conversation we don't make a pause between words so as we do when we're writing. So when a language has a lot of vowels and not so much consonants, it makes it difficult to study.

For young Danes there is difficult to distinguish words from each other. "When we, for example, say «bage alle kagerne», it sounds as «bageallekagerne», - says Dorthe Bleses, -"But we must remember that a child comes into the world without any knowledge of how language is constructed. So he has to do a detective work to find the words and understand what they mean".

It is assumed that in the future new research results will help not only to young children, who have difficulty to speak, but to the emigrants also, whose primary task is to learn Danish.

 

By materials of videnskab.dk