How do you pronounce the -breen that appears at the end of Svalbard glacier names? I went through all the Svalbard -breen glacier articles on Wikipedia at Category:Glaciers_of_Spitsbergen, and not a single one provides IPA. 2601:644:4301:D1B0:B94F:4C6C:A635:20B6 (talk) 02:32, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The -en ending is the Norwegian definite mascular singular suffix, and bre means "glacier", so, for example, Nansenbreen means "the Nansen glacier".

The pronunciations in Nynorsk and Bokmål would be slightly different, with also regional variations. I have no idea which variety of spoken Norwegian is prevalent among the roughly 2,500 Norvegicophone inhabitants of Svalbard.

Extrapolating from the pronunciations of other words, I believe the pronunciation of -breen to be:

• Nynorsk: /²brɛːn̩/
• Bokmål:  /bʁe̞ːn̩/

For the meaning of the toneme [²], see on Wiktionary Appendix:Norwegian Nynorsk pronunciation § Stress and tonemes.  --Lambiam 10:23, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(Simultaneous editing) Here an example of Norwegian pronounciation, "Jostedaalsbreen" first mentioned around 0:06. Since Norwegian is a language of dialects I cannot rule out that there could be regional differences in pronounciation. -- 79.91.113.116 (talk) 10:24, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This agrees with my extrapolation of the Nynorsk pronunciation.  --Lambiam 10:38, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

However, I believe the two ee in the middle are being distinguished in the pronounciation rather than just pronounced as a long vowel. -- 79.91.113.116 (talk) 11:40, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The long vowel represents solely the first ⟨e⟩. The definitive suffix -en is represented by [n̩]. The vertical understroke diacritic signifies that this is a syllabic consonant.  --Lambiam 15:46, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, that would make sense. Not an IPA expert here. -- 79.91.113.116 (talk) 16:05, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the dialect, I found this: https://munin.uit.no/handle/10037/14074. Excerpt from Google Translation: This is interesting because Svalbard has no local dialect. The language community on the archipelago is instead characterized by dialectal variation. The Norwegian population in Svalbard comes from all over Norway, and the average length of residence is short. . On Norwegian Wikipedia it stated that Nynorsk spellings have to be used for all town names in Svalbard but this probably has no bearing on the pronounciation practices. -- 79.91.113.116 (talk) 17:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you all for your input! So it's a monosyllabic /²brɛːn̩/. 2601:644:4301:D1B0:B94F:4C6C:A635:20B6 (talk) 21:05, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is it really monosyllabic if a syllabic vowel is followed by a syllabic consonant? By the way, I believe the common Swedish curse word fan often is pronounced somewhat similarly. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:45, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

By definition, a syllabic consonant forms a syllable on its own. So we have two syllables, the first of which ends on a vowel.  --Lambiam 00:01, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]