Copenhagen’s Metro will still announce its stations in English as well as Danish, but it’s giving up on the idea of giving English pronunciation for Danish station names, changing a long-standing practice.
This means, for example, that Frederiksberg will now have its soft ‘d’ and end with a ‘w’ sound instead of a hard ‘g’ when the English version of “next station, Frederiksberg” rings out on Metro trains. The bilingual announcements are for the benefit of foreign visitors, a large number of whom have more English than Danish.
The change was made after complaints that the names were confusing, didn’t help visitors much because they needed to hear the actual pronunciation so they could ask directions. The Metro system surveyed local and visitor riders, asking them to choose between the two pronunciations of a number of station names and found a majority of each group favored the Danish version.
Image: Ghent/Wikimedia Commons
