The voiced velar nasal, also known as eng, engma, or agma (from Greek 'fragment'), 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, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

al sound used in some spoken

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

s. It is the sound of ''ng'' in English ''sing'' as well as ''n'' before velar consonants as in ''English'' and ''ink''. 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 , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N. The IPA symbol is similar to , the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem, and to , the symbol for the

palatal nasal The voiced palatal nasal is a type of consonant used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a lowercase letter ''n'' with a leftward-pointing tail protruding from the bottom ...

, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the left stem. While almost all languages have and as

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s, is rarer. Half of the 469 languages surveyed in had a velar nasal phoneme; as a further curiosity, many of them limit its occurrence to the

syllable coda A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

. The velar nasal does not occur in many of the languages of

the Americas The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America.'' Webster's New World College Dictionary'', 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio. When viewed as a sin ...

, the Middle East, or the Caucasus, but it is extremely common among

Australian Aboriginal languages The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...

, languages of

Sub-Saharan Africa Sub-Saharan Africa is the area and regions of the continent of Africa that lie south of the Sahara. These include Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa. Geopolitically, in addition to the list of sovereign states and ...

East Asian East Asia is a geocultural region of Asia. It includes China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan, plus two special administrative regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau. The economies of Economy of China, China, Economy of Ja ...

and Southeast Asian languages, and

Polynesian languages The Polynesian languages form a genealogical group of languages, itself part of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family. There are 38 Polynesian languages, representing 7 percent of the 522 Oceanic languages, and 3 percent of the Austr ...

. In many languages that do not have the velar nasal as a phoneme, such as the

Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...

, it occurs as an allophone of before velar consonants. This kind of assimilation can even be found in languages with phonemic voiced velar nasals, such as English. An example of this phenomenon is the word ''income''; its

underlying representation In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any ph ...

, , can be realized as either or . An example of a language that lacks a phonemic or allophonic velar nasal is Russian, in which is pronounced as laminal denti-alveolar even before velar consonants. Some languages have the pre-velar nasal, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical velar nasal, though not as front as the prototypical

- see that article for more information. Conversely, some languages have the post-velar nasal,Instead of "post-velar", it can be called "retracted velar", "backed velar", "pre-uvular", "advanced uvular" or "fronted uvular". which is articulated slightly behind the place of articulation of a prototypical velar nasal, though not as back as the prototypical uvular nasal.

Features

Features of the voiced velar nasal:

Occurrence

Notes

References

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

External links

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

Features

Occurrence

See also

Notes

References

External links