In
phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an
oral stop or
nasalized consonant
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majori ...
, is an
occlusive
In phonetics, an occlusive, sometimes known as a stop, is a consonant sound produced by occluding (i.e. blocking) airflow in the vocal tract, but not necessarily in the nasal tract. The duration of the block is the ''occlusion'' of the consonan ...
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...
produced with a lowered
velum
Velum may refer to:
Human anatomy
* Superior medullary velum, anterior medullary velum or valve of Vieussens, white matter, in the brain, which stretches between the superior cerebellar peduncles
** Frenulum of superior medullary velum, a sligh ...
, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majority of consonants are
oral consonant
An oral consonant is a consonant sound in speech that is made by allowing air to escape from the mouth, as opposed to the nose, as in a nasal consonant. To create an intended oral consonant sound, the entire mouth plays a role in modifying the air ...
s. Examples of nasals in
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
are , and , in words such as ''nose'', ''bring'' and ''mouth''. Nasal occlusives are nearly universal in human languages. There are also other kinds of nasal consonants in some languages.
Definition
Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal occlusives, in which air escapes through the nose but not through the mouth, as it is blocked (occluded) by the lips or tongue. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound. Rarely, non-occlusive consonants may be
nasalized
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internationa ...
.
Most nasals are
voiced
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced.
The term, however, is used to refer ...
, and in fact, the nasal sounds and are among the most common sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals occur in a few languages such as
Burmese,
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...
,
Icelandic and
Guaraní Guarani, Guaraní or Guarany may refer to
Ethnography
* Guaraní people, an indigenous people from South America's interior (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia)
* Guaraní language, or Paraguayan Guarani, an official language of Paraguay
* ...
. (Compare oral
stops, which block off the air completely, and
fricatives
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
, which obstruct the air with a narrow channel. Both stops and fricatives are more commonly voiceless than voiced, and are known as
obstruent
An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...
s.)
In terms of acoustics, nasals are
sonorant
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are ...
s, which means that they do not significantly restrict the escape of air (as it can freely escape out the nose). However, nasals are also
obstruent
An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...
s in their articulation because the flow of air through the mouth is blocked. This duality, a sonorant airflow through the nose along with an obstruction in the mouth, means that nasal occlusives behave both like sonorants and like obstruents. For example, nasals tend to pattern with other sonorants such as and , but in many languages, they may develop from or into stops.
Acoustically, nasals have bands of energy at around 200 and 2,000 Hz.
1. The symbol is commonly used to represent the
dental nasal as well, rather than , as it is rarely distinguished from the
alveolar nasal.
Examples of languages containing nasal occlusives:
The voiced retroflex nasal is is a common sound in
Languages of India
Languages spoken in India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-European languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians, both families together are sometimes known ...
.
The voiced palatal nasal is a common sound in
European languages
Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. Within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Ro ...
, such as:
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
,
French and
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
,
Catalan
Catalan may refer to:
Catalonia
From, or related to Catalonia:
* Catalan language, a Romance language
* Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia
Places
* 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
and
Hungarian ,
Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
* Czech, ...
and
Slovak ,
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles
Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...
,
Occitan Occitan may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Occitania territory in parts of France, Italy, Monaco and Spain.
* Something of, from, or related to the Occitania administrative region of France.
* Occitan language
Occitan (; o ...
and
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
, and (before a vowel)
Modern Greek
Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...
.
Many
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, Engli ...
, including
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
,
Dutch
Dutch commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
* Dutch people ()
* Dutch language ()
Dutch may also refer to:
Places
* Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States
* Pennsylvania Dutch Country
People E ...
,
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
and
Swedish
Swedish or ' may refer to:
Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically:
* Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland
** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
, as well as
varieties of Chinese
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...
such as
Mandarin
Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to:
Language
* Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country
** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China
** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...
and
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...
, have , and .
Tamil
Tamil may refer to:
* Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia
**Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils
**Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia
* Tamil language, nativ ...
has a six-fold distinction between , , , , and .
The
Nuosu language also contrasts six categories of nasals, , , , , and . They are represented in romanisation by m, n, hm, hn, ny, and ng. Nuosu also contrasts nasalised stops and affricates with their voiced, unvoiced, and aspirated versions.
Catalan,
Occitan Occitan may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Occitania territory in parts of France, Italy, Monaco and Spain.
* Something of, from, or related to the Occitania administrative region of France.
* Occitan language
Occitan (; o ...
, Spanish, and Italian have , , as
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s, and and as allophones. Nevertheless, among many younger speakers of
Rioplatense Spanish
Rioplatense Spanish (), also known as Rioplatense Castilian, is a variety of Spanish spoken mainly in and around the Río de la Plata Basin of Argentina and Uruguay. It is also referred to as River Plate Spanish or Argentine Spanish. It is the ...
, there is no palatal nasal but only a palatalized nasal, , as in English ''canyon''.
In
Brazilian Portuguese
Brazilian Portuguese (' ), also Portuguese of Brazil (', ) or South American Portuguese (') is the set of varieties of the Portuguese language native to Brazil and the most influential form of Portuguese worldwide. It is spoken by almost all of ...
and
Angolan Portuguese , written , is typically pronounced as , a
nasal palatal approximant
The nasal palatal approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some oral languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , that is, a j with a tilde. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is j~, and in the ...
, a nasal glide (in
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles
Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, w ...
, this feature is also possible as an allophone). Semivowels in
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
often nasalize before and always after nasal vowels, resulting in and . What would be
coda
Coda or CODA may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* Movie coda, a post-credits scene
* ''Coda'' (1987 film), an Australian horror film about a serial killer, made for television
*''Coda'', a 2017 American experimental film from Na ...
nasal occlusives in other
West Iberian languages
West Iberian is a branch of the Ibero-Romance languages that includes the Castilian languages ( Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish, Extremaduran (sometimes) and Loreto-Ucayali), Astur-Leonese ( Asturian, Leonese, Mirandese, Extremaduran (sometimes) and ...
is only slightly pronounced before
dental consonant
A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as , . In some languages, dentals are distinguished from other groups, such as alveolar consonants, in which the tongue contacts the gum ridge. Dental c ...
s. Outside this environment the nasality is spread over the vowel or become a nasal diphthong (''mambembe'' , outside the
final
Final, Finals or The Final may refer to:
*Final (competition), the last or championship round of a sporting competition, match, game, or other contest which decides a winner for an event
** Another term for playoffs, describing a sequence of cont ...
, only in Brazil, and ''mantém'' in all Portuguese dialects).
The
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
syllabary kana ん, typically romanized as ''n'' and occasionally ''m'', can manifest as one of several different nasal consonants depending on what consonant follows it; this allophone, colloquially written in IPA as , is known as the
moraic nasal, per the language's moraic structure.
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...
has a set of voiceless nasals,
̥ ̥and
̊ which occur predominantly as a result of
nasal mutation of their voiced counterparts (
and
.
The
Mapos Buang language of New Guinea has a phonemic uvular nasal,
which contrasts with a velar nasal. It is extremely rare for a language to have
as a phoneme.
Yanyuwa is highly unusual in that it has a seven-way distinction between
̪ (
palato-alveolar),
̟(
front velar), and
̠(
back velar). This may be the only language in existence that contrasts nasals at seven distinct points of articulation.
The term 'nasal occlusive' (or 'nasal stop') is generally abbreviated to ''nasal''. However, there are also nasalized fricatives, nasalized flaps,
nasal glide
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...
s, and
nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced wit ...
s, as in French, Portuguese, and Polish. In the help:IPA, IPA, nasal vowels and nasalized consonants are indicated by placing a tilde (~) over the vowel or consonant in question: French ''sang'' , Portuguese ''bom'' .
Voiceless nasals
A few languages have phonemic voiceless nasal occlusives. Among them are
Icelandic,
Faroese,
Burmese,
Jalapa Mazatec
Jalapa Mazatec is a Mazatecan language. An estimate from 1990 suggested it was spoken by 15,000 people, one-third of whom are monolingual, in 13 villages in the vicinity of the town of San Felipe Jalapa de Díaz in the Tuxtepec District of the M ...
,
Kildin Sami Kildin may refer to:
* Kildin Island
* Kildin class destroyer
* Kildin Sami
* Ostrov (air base)
Ostrov (Russian: ''Веретье'' ("Veret"); also Ostrov-5, Gorokhovka) is a Russian Air Force air base ,
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...
, and
Central Alaskan Yup'ik.
Iaai of New Caledonia has an unusually large number of them, with , along with a number of
voiceless approximant
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...
s.
Other kinds of nasal consonant
Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) distinguish purely nasal consonants, the nasal occlusives such as ''m n ng'' in which the airflow is purely nasal, from partial nasal consonants such as
prenasalized consonant
Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant such as ) that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rathe ...
s and nasal
pre-stopped consonant In linguistics
Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its natur ...
s, which are nasal for only part of their duration, as well as from nasalized consonants, which have simultaneous oral and nasal airflow. In some languages, such as
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
, a nasal consonant may have occlusive and non-occlusive
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''s ...
s. In general, therefore, a nasal consonant may be:
* a nasal occlusive, such as English ''m, n, ng''
* a
nasal approximant
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...
, as in ''nh'' in some
Portuguese dialects
Portuguese dialects are the mutually intelligible variations of the Portuguese language over Portuguese-speaking countries and other areas holding some degree of cultural bound with the language. Portuguese has two standard forms of writing and ...
* a nasal
flap
Flap may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
* ''Flap'' (film), a 1970 American film
* Flap, a boss character in the arcade game ''Gaiapolis''
* Flap, a minor character in the film '' Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland''
Biology and he ...
, such as the nasal
retroflex lateral flap
The voiced retroflex lateral flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The expected symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is ().Kirk Miller & Michael AshbyL2/20-252RUnicode request for IPA modifier-letters (a), ...
in
Pashto
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ().
Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official languages ...
* prenasalized consonants, pre-stopped nasals and post-stopped nasals
*
nasal click
Nasal clicks are click consonants pronounced with nasal airflow. All click types ( alveolar , dental , lateral , palatal , retroflex , and labial ) have nasal variants, and these are attested in four or five phonations: voiced, voiceless, a ...
s such as
Zulu ''nq, nx, nc''
* other
nasalized
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internationa ...
consonants, such as
nasalized fricatives
Languages without nasals
A few languages, perhaps 2%, contain no phonemically distinctive nasals. This led Ferguson (1963) to assume that all languages have at least one primary nasal occlusive. However, there are exceptions.
Lack of phonemic nasals
When a language is claimed to lack nasals altogether, as with several
Niger–Congo languages[These languages lie in a band from western Liberia to southeastern Nigeria, and north to southern Burkina Faso. They include:
*Liberia: Kpelle (Mande); Grebo, Klao (Kru)
*Burkina Faso: Bwamu (Gur)
*Ivory Coast: Dan, Guro-Yaoure, Wan-Mwan, Gban/Gagu, Tura (Mande); Senadi/Senufo (Gur); Nyabwa, Wè (Kru); Ebrié, Avikam, Abure (Kwa)
*Ghana: Abron, Akan, Ewe (Kwa)
*Benin: Gen, Fon (Kwa)
*Nigeria: Mbaise Igbo, Ikwere (Igboid)
*CAR: Yakoma (Ubangi)
(Heine & Nurse, eds, 2008, ''A Linguistic Geography of Africa'', p.46)] or the
Pirahã language
Pirahã (also spelled ''Pirahá, Pirahán''), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River.
Pirahã is the only survivi ...
of the Amazon, nasal and non-nasal or prenasalized consonants usually alternate
allophonically, and it is a theoretical claim on the part of the individual linguist that the nasal is not the basic form of the consonant. In the case of some Niger–Congo languages, for example, nasals occur before only nasal vowels. Since nasal vowels are phonemic, it simplifies the picture somewhat to assume that nasalization in occlusives is allophonic. There is then a second step in claiming that nasal vowels nasalize oral occlusives, rather than oral vowels denasalizing nasal occlusives, that is, whether are phonemically without full nasals, or without prenasalized stops. Postulating underlying oral or prenasalized stops rather than true nasals helps to explain the apparent instability of nasal correspondences throughout Niger–Congo compared with, for example, Indo-European.
This analysis comes at the expense, in some languages, of postulating either a single nasal consonant that can only be syllabic, or a larger set of nasal vowels than oral vowels, both typologically odd situations. The way such a situation could develop is illustrated by a
Jukunoid language
The Jukunoid languages are a branch of the Benue-Congo languages spoken by the Jukun and related peoples of Nigeria and Cameroon. They are distributed mostly throughout Taraba State, Nigeria and surrounding regions.
Their asymmetrical nasal ...
,
Wukari
Wukari is a Local Government Area in Taraba State, Nigeria. Its headquarters is in the town of Wukari on the A4 highway. The Donga River flows through the area and the Benue River forms a boundary with Nasarawa State to the northwest. It has an ...
. Wukari allows oral vowels in syllables like ''ba, mba'' and nasal vowels in ''bã, mã'', suggesting that nasals become prenasalized stops before oral vowels. Historically, however, *mb became **mm before nasal vowels, and then reduced to *m, leaving the current asymmetric distribution.
In older speakers of the
Tlingit language
The Tlingit language ( ; ''Lingít'' ) is spoken by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada and is a branch of the Na-Dene language family. Extensive effort is being put into revitalization programs in Southeast Alaska to rev ...
, and are allophones. Tlingit is usually described as having an unusual, perhaps unique lack of despite having five
lateral obstruents; the older generation could be argued to have but at the expense of having no nasals.
Lack of phonetic nasals
Several of languages surrounding
Puget Sound
Puget Sound ( ) is a sound of the Pacific Northwest, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and part of the Salish Sea. It is located along the northwestern coast of the U.S. state of Washington. It is a complex estuarine system of interconnected ma ...
, such as
Quileute
The Quileute , are a Native American people in western Washington state in the United States, currently numbering approximately 2,000. They are a federally recognized tribe: the ''Quileute Tribe of the Quileute Reservation''.
The Quileute peo ...
(Chimakuan family),
Lushootseed
Lushootseed (txʷəlšucid, dxʷləšúcid), also Puget Salish, Puget Sound Salish or Skagit-Nisqually, is a language made up of a dialect continuum of several Salish tribes of modern-day Washington state. Lushootseed is one of the Coast Salis ...
(Salishan family), and
Makah
The Makah (; Klallam: ''màq̓áʔa'')Renker, Ann M., and Gunther, Erna (1990). "Makah". In "Northwest Coast", ed. Wayne Suttles. Vol. 7 of '' Handbook of North American Indians'', ed. William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Instit ...
(Wakashan family), are truly without any nasalization whatsoever, in consonants or vowels, except in special speech registers such as
baby talk
Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child or infant. It is also called caretaker speech, infant-directed speech (IDS), child-directed speech (CDS), child-directed language (CDL), caregiver register, parent ...
or the archaic speech of mythological figures (and perhaps not even that in the case of Quileute). This is an
areal feature
In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language, or, common ancestor language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted to ...
, only a few hundred years old, where nasals became voiced stops ( became , etc.) after colonial contact. For example, "Snohomish" is currently pronounced ''sdohobish'', but was transcribed with nasals in the first English-language records.
The only other places in the world where this is known to occur are in Melanesia. In the central dialect of the
Rotokas language
Rotokas is a North Bougainville language spoken by about 4,320 people on the island of Bougainville, an island located to the east of New Guinea which is part of Papua New Guinea. According to Allen and Hurd (1963), there are three identifie ...
of Bougainville Island, nasals are only used when imitating foreign accents. (A second dialect has a series of nasals.) The
Lakes Plain languages
The Lakes Plain languages are a family of Papuan languages, spoken in the Lakes Plain of Indonesian New Guinea. They are notable for being heavily tonal and for their lack of nasal consonants.
Classification
The Lakes Plain languages were tenta ...
of West Irian are similar.
The unconditioned loss of nasals, as in Puget Sound, is unusual. However, currently in
Korean
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
, word-initial and are shifting to and . This started out in nonstandard dialects and was restricted to the beginning of prosodic units (a common position for
fortition
Fortition, also known as strengthening, is a consonantal change that increases the degree of stricture. It is the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a stop (i.e. becomes or becomes ). Al ...
), but has expanded to many speakers of the standard language to the beginnings of common words even within prosodic units.
[Yoshida, Kenji, 2008. "Phonetic implementation of Korean 'denasalization' and its variation related to prosody". IULC Working Papers, vol. 6.]
See also
*
Oral consonant
An oral consonant is a consonant sound in speech that is made by allowing air to escape from the mouth, as opposed to the nose, as in a nasal consonant. To create an intended oral consonant sound, the entire mouth plays a role in modifying the air ...
*
Nasal click
Nasal clicks are click consonants pronounced with nasal airflow. All click types ( alveolar , dental , lateral , palatal , retroflex , and labial ) have nasal variants, and these are attested in four or five phonations: voiced, voiceless, a ...
*
Nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced wit ...
* Nasalization
* List of phonetics topics
* Syllabic consonant
Notes
References
Bibliography
*Ferguson (1963) 'Assumptions about nasals', in Greenberg (ed.) ''Universals of Language'', pp. 50–60.
*Saout, J. le (1973) 'Languages sans consonnes nasales', ''Annales de l Université d'Abidjan'', H, 6, 1, 179–205.
*
Williamson, Kay (1989) 'Niger–Congo overview', in Bendor-Samuel & Hartell (eds.) ''The Niger–Congo Languages'', 3–45.
{{Authority control
Manner of articulation