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. ...
, denasalization is the loss of nasal airflow in a nasal sound, such as a
nasal 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 major ...
or 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 with ...
. That may be due to speech pathology but also occurs when the paranasal sinus, sinuses are blocked from a common cold, when it is called a
nasal voice
A nasal voice is a type of speaking voice characterized by speech with a "nasal" quality. It can also occur naturally because of genetic variation.
Nasal speech can be divided into hypo-nasal and hyper-nasal.
Hyponasal speech
Hyponasal speech, ...
, which is not a linguistic term. Acoustically, it is the "absence of the expected nasal resonance."
[Martin Duckworth, George Allen, William Hardcastle & Martin Ball (1990]
‘Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for the transcription of atypical speech.’
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 4: 4, p. 276. The symbol in the
Extended IPA is .
When one speaks with a cold, the
nasal passages still function as a resonant cavity so a denasalized nasal does not sound like a voiced oral stop , and a denasalized vowel does not sound like an oral vowel .
However, there are cases of historical or allophonic denasalization that have produced oral stops. In some languages with nasal vowels, such as
Paicĩ, nasal consonants may occur only before nasal vowels; before oral vowels,
prenasalized stop
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, rather ...
s are found. That allophonic variation is likely to be from a historical process of partia