Coming To Copenhagen

Before setting you loose to explore Copenhagen on your own, I need to let you in on a secret: A lot of the people you’ll be meeting today aren’t Danes. They’re Swedes.

Each day, they come across the Oresund Bridge, which opened in 2000, from Malmo, Sweden’s third’s largest city. Such is the number of Swedes who commute back and forth between the two that some people joke that Malmo is West Copenhagen. I once met a Swede who worked at the airport but had never bothered to make the 10-minute trip into Copenhagen’s city center. Swedes come to Copenhagen because they earn higher wages (and pay less in taxes) than in Sweden.

Here’s a hint to help you tell the Danes from the Swedes. If you hear Copenhagen referred to as something that sounds vaguely like “Shopping Ham,” you’ve met a Swede. The “K” in København, which is how “Merchant’s Harbor” is spelled in Danish, is pronounced as an “sh” in Swedish and is spelled in Swedish as “Köpenhamn.”

The Danes swallow consonants. Nyhavn, which you and I would pronounce phonetically as “Knee haven” is pronounced in Danish as “New Hound,” swallowing the D at the end.

Strøget, the walking street that you’re eventually headed to, is pronounced “Stro Et.” And even that is not phonetically correct. Those of us outside of Scandinavia can’t pronounce any Danish words with phonetic accuracy. Our tongues are not genetically engineered to handle the complexity of the vowel/consonant combinations.

The point of all this is to keep you from making a fool of yourself. But if you really want to avoid doing that, here’s a tip: Don’t even pretend you can speak the language. Not to worry: The Danes can speak English with perfection.