Prompted by a recent debate about what constitutes the phoneme inventory of standard Danish and how to establish it, I aim to demonstrate that within a traditional structuralist framework, contrast (commutation) and distribution (complementarity) are both ineluctable parameters in the phonological analysis. I do not advocate any one specific result of the analysis, but present the criteria for progressing from surface contrasts to
phoneme inventories at different levels of abstraction and the considerations that inform the choices along the way.