The voiced uvular nasal is a type of

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 ...

al sound, used in some spoken

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s. The symbol in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

that represents this sound is , a

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version of the Latin letter n; the equivalent

X-SAMPA The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and ...

symbol is N\. The uvular nasal is a rare sound cross-linguistically, occurring as a phoneme in only a small handful of languages. It is complex in terms of articulation, and also highly marked, as it is inherently difficult to produce a nasal articulation at the uvular point of contact. This difficulty can be said to account for the marked rarity of this sound among the world's languages. The uvular nasal most commonly occurs as a conditioned allophone of other sounds, for example as an allophone of before a uvular plosive as in

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, or as an allophone of /q/ before another nasal consonant as in Selkup. However, it has been reported to exist as an independent phoneme in a small number of languages. Examples include the

Klallam language Klallam, Clallam, Ns'Klallam or S'klallam (endonym: Nəxʷsƛ̓ay̓əmúcən), is a Straits Salishan language that was traditionally spoken by the Klallam peoples at Becher Bay on Vancouver Island in British Columbia and across the Strait of Juan ...

, the Tawellemmet and

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varieties of Tuareg Berber, the Rangakha dialect of

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, at least two dialects of the

Bai language The Bai language (Bai: ; ) is a language spoken in China, primarily in Yunnan Province, by the Bai people. The language has over a million speakers and is divided into three or four main dialects. Bai syllables are always open, with a rich set ...

, and the Papuan language Mapos Buang. In Mapos Buang and in the Bai dialects, it contrasts phonemically with a velar nasal. The syllable-final nasal in

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was traditionally said to be realized as a uvular nasal when utterance-final, but empirical studies have disputed this claim. There is also the pre-uvular nasalInstead of "pre-uvular", it can be called "advanced uvular", "fronted uvular", "post-velar", "retracted velar" or "backed velar". For simplicity, this article uses only the term "pre-uvular". in some languages such as Yanyuwa, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical uvular nasal, though not as front as the prototypical velar nasal. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have a separate symbol for that sound, though it can be transcribed as ( advanced ), or (both symbols denote a retracted ). The equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are N\_+ and N_-, respectively.

Features

Features of the voiced uvular nasal:

Occurrence

Notes

References

* * *

External links

* {{IPA navigation Uvular consonants Nasal consonants Pulmonic consonants Voiced consonants

Features

Occurrence

See also

Notes

References

External links