Nasalization

 ( Phonetics ) 

In phonetics, nasalisation (or nasalization in American English) is the production of a sound while the soft palate is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasalisation is indicated by printing a tilde diacritic above the symbol for the sound to be nasalised: is the nasalised equivalent of , and is the nasalised equivalent of . A subscript diacritic , called an ogonek or nosinė, is sometimes seen, especially when the vowel bears tone marks that would interfere with the superscript tilde. For example, are more legible in most fonts than .

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Nasal vowels Many languages have nasal to different degrees, but only a minority of world languages around the world have nasal vowels as contrasting phonemes. That is the case, among others, of French language, Portuguese, Hindustani, Nepali language, Breton language, Gheg Albanian, Hmong language, Hokkien, Yoruba language, and Cherokee. Those nasal vowels contrast with their corresponding . Nasality is usually seen as a binary feature, although surface variation in different degrees of nasality caused by neighboring has been observed.

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Degree of nasality There are languages, such as in Palantla Chinantec, where vowels seem to exhibit three contrastive degrees of nasality: oral e.g. vs lightly nasalised vs heavily nasalised ,

Juliette Blevins (2025). 9780521804288, Cambridge University Press. . ISBN 9780521804288

although Ladefoged and Maddieson believe that the lightly nasalised vowels are best described as oro-nasal . Note that Ladefoged and Maddieson's transcription of heavy nasalisation with a double tilde might be confused with the extIPA adoption of that diacritic for velopharyngeal frication.

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Nasal consonants By far the most common nasal sounds are such as , or . Most nasal consonants are occlusives, and airflow through the mouth is blocked and redirected through the nose. Their oral counterparts are the stop consonant.

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Nasalised consonants Nasalised versions of other consonant sounds also exist but are much rarer than either nasal occlusives or nasal vowels. The Middle Chinese Guangyun (; in modern Standard Chinese) has an odd history; for example, it has evolved into and (or and respectively, depending on accents) in Standard Chinese; / and in Hokkien; / and / while borrowed into Japan. It seems likely that it was once a nasalized fricative, perhaps a palatal .

In Coatzospan Mixtec, fricatives and affricates are nasalized before nasal vowels even when they are voiceless. That is cognate with a nasalised palatal approximant in other Athabaskan languages.

In Umbundu language, phonemic contrasts with the (allophone) nasalised approximant and so is likely to be a true fricative rather than an approximant. In Old Irish and Middle Irish, the lenition was a nasalised bilabial fricative .

Ganza language has a phonemic nasalized glottal stop while Sundanese has it allophonically; nasalised stops can occur only with pharyngeal articulation or lower, or they would be simple nasals. Nasal flap consonant are common allophonically. Many West African languages have a nasal flap (or ) as an allophone of before a nasal vowel; voiced retroflex nasal flaps are common intervocalic allophones of in South Asian languages.

A nasal trill has been described from some dialects of Romanian, and is posited as an intermediate historical step in rhotacism. However, the phonetic variation of the sound is considerable, and it is not clear how frequently it is actually trilled. Some languages contrast like Toro-tegu Dogon and Inor. A nasal lateral has been reported for some languages, Nzema language contrasts , Nemi language contrasts .

Other languages, such as the Khoisan languages of Khoekhoe and Gǀui, as well as several of the !Kung languages, include nasal click consonants. Nasal clicks are typically with a nasal or superscript nasal preceding the consonant (for example, velar-dental or and uvular-dental or ). Nasalised laterals such as (a nasalised lateral alveolar click) are easy to produce but rare or nonexistent as phonemes; nasalised lateral clicks are common in Southern African languages such as Zulu language. Often when is nasalised, it becomes .

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True nasal fricatives Besides nasalised oral fricatives, there are true nasal fricatives, or anterior nasal fricatives, previously called nareal fricatives. They are sometimes produced by people with Speech disorder due to velopharyngeal-port incompetence. The turbulence in the airflow characteristic of is produced not in the mouth but at the anterior nasal port, the narrowest part of the nasal cavity. (Turbulence can also be produced at the posterior nasal port, or velopharyngeal port, when that port is narrowed – see velopharyngeal fricative. With anterior nasal fricatives, the velopharyngeal port is open.)

An upright tilde is used for this in the extensions to the IPA: is a voiced alveolar nasal fricative, with no airflow out of the mouth; this will generally occur when is intended. is an oral fricative with simultaneous nasal frication; this will generally occur when is intended.

No known language makes use of nasal fricatives in non-disordered speech.

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Denasalisation Nasalisation may be lost over time. There are also Denasalisation sounds, which sound like nasals spoken with a head cold. They may be found in non-pathological speech as a language loses nasal consonants, as in Korean language.

is a sound partway between  and .
     

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Contextual nasalisation Vowels assimilate to surrounding in many languages, such as Thai language, creating nasal vowel allophones. Some languages exhibit a nasalisation of segments adjacent to phonemic or allophonic nasal vowels, such as Apurinã.

Contextual nasalisation can lead to the addition of nasal vowel phonemes to a language. That happened in French, most of whose final consonants disappeared, but its final nasals made the preceding vowels become nasal, which introduced a new distinction into the language. An example is vin blanc , ultimately from Latin vinum and blancum.

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See also

• Eclipsis, a similar process in Gaelic that is often called "nasalisation"
• Nasal consonant
• Nasal release
• Nasal vowel
• Nasality
• Prenasalised consonant

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Works cited

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