The voiceless nasal glottal approximant is a type of consonantal sound, a nasal approximant, used in some oral languages. The symbol in the

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

that represents this sound is , that is, an ''h'' with a

tilde The tilde (, also ) is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...

Occurrence

The ''h'' sound is nasalized in several languages, apparently due to a connection between glottal and nasal sounds called '' rhinoglottophilia''. Examples of languages where the only h-like sound is nasalized are Krim, Lisu, and Pirahã. More rarely, a language will contrast oral and nasal . Two such languages are neighboring Bantu languages of Angola and Namibia, Kwangali and Mbukushu. In these languages, vowels following are nasalized, though nasal vowels do not occur elsewhere. A distinction is also reported from Wolaytta, though in that case the nasal is rare. Swazi distinguishes /h, h̃, ɦ, ɦ̃/.

Notes

References

* * * * *

External links

* Approximant-fricative consonants Glottal consonants Nasal consonants Pulmonic consonants Voiceless nasal approximants {{phonetics-stub