A database of recordings of Danish Emotional Speech, DES, has been recorded and analysed. DES has been collected in order to evaluate how well the emotional state in emotional speech is identified by humans. The results sets a standard for identifying Danish emotional speech. DES contains recordings from four actors, two of each gender. Actors were used for the recordings as they were believed to be able to realistically convey a number of emotions, namely: neutral, surprise, happiness, sadness and anger. The recordings from each actor consist of two isolated words, nine sentences and two passages. The complete database comprises approximately 30 minutes of speech. A listening test with 20 listeners was conducted. The emotions were on the average identified correctly in 67,3% of the cases, with a [66,0 - 68,6] 95% confidence interval. An analysis reveals that most confusion occurred between surprise and happiness and between neutral and sadness.