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 Human nose and the human mouth simultaneously, as in the French language vowel /ɑ̃/ () or Amoy dialect . By contrast, oral vowels are produced without nasalization.
Nasalized vowels are vowels under the influence of neighbouring sounds. For instance, the of the word hand is affected by the following nasal consonant. In most languages, vowels adjacent to are produced partially or fully with a lowered velum in a natural process of assimilation and are therefore technically nasal, but few speakers would notice. That is the case in English: vowels preceding nasal consonants are nasalized, but there is no phoneme distinction between nasal and oral vowels, and all vowels are considered phonemically oral.
Some languages contrast oral vowels and nasalized vowels phoneme.[Crystal, David. (2008). Nasal. In A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (6th ed., pp. 320–321). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.] Linguists make use of to decide whether or not the nasality is of linguistic importance. In French, for instance, nasal vowels are distinct from oral vowels, and words can differ by the vowel quality. The words beau "beautiful" and bon "good" are a minimal pair that contrasts primarily the vowel nasalization even though the from bon is slightly more open vowel.
Portuguese allows nasal , which contrast with their oral counterparts, like the pair mau "bad" and mão "hand".
Although there are French in English with nasal vowels like croissant , there is no expectation that an English-speaker would nasalize the vowels to the same extent as French-speakers or Portuguese-speakers. Likewise, pronunciation keys in English dictionaries do not always indicate nasalization of French or Portuguese loanwords.
Influence on vowel height
Nasalization as a result of the assimilation of a
nasal consonant tends to cause a raising of vowel height; phonemically distinctive nasalization tends to lower the vowel.
[Beddor, P. S. 1983. Phonological and phonetic effects of nasalization on vowel height] According to a different assessment, high vowels do tend to be lowered, but low vowels tend to be raised instead.
[ Carignan, Christopher et al. 2010. Lingual response to vowel nasalization. Conference on Phonetic Universals, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, October 2010]
In most languages, vowels of all heights are nasalized indiscriminately, but preference occurs in some languages, such as for high vowels in Chamorro and low vowels in Thai language.[Hajek, John. (2013). Vowel Nasalization. In M. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Retrieved 30 March 2019 from [2]]
Degree of nasalization
A few languages, such as Palantla Chinantec,
[Blevins, Juliette. (2004). Evolutionary Phonology: The Emergence of Sound Patterns (p. 203). Cambridge University Press.] contrast lightly nasalized and heavily nasalized vowels. They may be contrasted in print by doubling the IPA diacritic for nasalization: vs . Bickford & Floyd (2006) combine the tilde with the
ogonek: vs . (The ogonek is sometimes used in an otherwise IPA transcription to avoid conflict with
Tone mark above the vowels.)
Origin
Rodney Sampson described a three-stage historical account, explaining the origin of nasal vowels in modern
French language. The notation of Terry and Webb is used below, where V, N, and Ṽ (with a tilde above) represent oral vowel, nasal consonant, and nasal vowel, respectively.
[Terry, Kristen Kennedy & Webb, Eric Russell. (2011). Modeling the emergence of a typological anomaly: Vowel nasalization in French. In Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 37(1), 155–169.]
| + Historical development of French nasal vowels by century
! Stage 1 !! Stage 2 !! Stage 3 |
| –18th |
| vɑ̃ |
In the Old French period, vowels became nasalized under the regressive assimilation, as VN > ṼN. In the Middle French period, the realization of the nasal consonant became variable, as VN > Ṽ(N). As the language evolves into its modern form, the consonant is no longer realized, as ṼN > Ṽ.
Orthography
Languages written with
Latin script may indicate nasal vowels by a trailing
Silent letter n or
m, as is the case in French, Portuguese,
Lombard language (central classic orthography),
Bambara language,
Breton language, and
Yoruba language.
In other cases, they are indicated by . In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasal vowels are denoted by a tilde over the symbol for the vowel. The same practice can be found in Portuguese marking with a tilde in diphthongs (e.g. põe) and for words ending in /ɐ̃/ (e.g. manhã, irmã). While the tilde is also used for this purpose in Guarani language, phonemic nasality is indicated by a diaeresis ( ¨ ) in the standardized orthographies of most varieties of Tupí-Guaraní spoken in Bolivia. Polish language, Navajo language, and Elfdalian use a hook under the letter, called an ogonek, as in ą, ę. The Pe̍h-ōe-jī romanization of Taiwanese Hokkien and Amoy dialect uses a superscript n ( aⁿ, eⁿ, ...). In the orthography of the First Grammatical Treatise for the Old Icelandic, nasal vowels are indicated with a dot above the vowel grapheme: a /ɑ/ vs ȧ /ɑ̃/, ǫ /ɔ/ vs ǫ̇ /ɔ̃/, e /e/ vs. ė /ẽ/ vs ę /ɛ/ vs. ę̇ /ɛ̃/, ı /i/ vs i /ĩ/, o /o/ vs ȯ /õ/, ø /ø/ vs. ø̇ /ø̃/, u /u/ vs u̇ /ũ/, y /y/ vs ẏ /ỹ/; the ogonek instead indicates retracted tongue root or Tenseness, cf. ǫ /ɔ/ vs o /o/ and e /e/ vs. ę /ɛ/.
Arabic scripts
Indo-Aryan
Nasalization in Arabic-based scripts of languages such as
Urdu alphabet, as well as Punjabi and
Saraiki language, commonly spoken in
Pakistan, and by extension
India, is indicated by employing the nasal vowel, a dotless form of the Arabic letter nūn () or the letter marked with the
maghnūna diacritic: respectively , always occurring word finally, or in the medial form, called "
nun gunna". In
Sindhi language, nasalization is represented with the standard nun letter.
Classical Arabic
Nasalized vowels occur in
Classical Arabic but not in contemporary speech or Modern Standard Arabic. There is no orthographic way to denote the nasalization, but it is systematically taught as part of the essential rules of
tajwid, used to read the Qur'an. Nasalization occurs in recitation, usually when a final nūn is followed by a yāʾ (ي).
Indic scripts
The
Brahmic scripts used for most Indic languages mark nasalization with the anusvāra (◌ं), homophonically used for
homorganic nasalization in a consonant cluster following the vowel) or the
chandrabindu (◌ँ) diacritic (and its regional variants).
Languages
The following languages use phonemic nasal vowels:
See also
Further reading
-
de Medeiros, Beatriz Raposo. (2011). Nasal Coda and Vowel Nasality in Brazilian Portuguese. In S. M. Alvord (Ed.), Selected Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology (pp. 33–45).
-
Hajek, John & Maeda, Shinji. (2000). Investigating Universals of Sound Change: the Effect of Vowel Height and Duration on the Development of Distinctive Nasalization. Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Acquisition and the lexicon (pp. 52–69).
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Jeong, Sunwoo. (2012). Directional asymmetry in nasalization: Aperceptual account. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology, 18(3), 437–469.
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Michaud, A., Jacques, G., & Rankin, R. L. (2012). Historical transfer of nasality between consonantal onset and vowel: from C to V or from V to C? Diachronica, 29(2), 201–230.
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Sampson, Rodney. (1999). Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance. Oxford University Press.
