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In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an Stop consonant or nasalization, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered soft palate, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majority of consonants are . Examples of nasals in English language are , and , in words such as nose, bring and mouth. Nasal occlusives are nearly universal in human languages. There are also other kinds of nasal consonants in some languages.
Most nasals are voiced, and in fact, the nasal sounds and are among the most common sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals occur in a few languages such as Burmese language, Welsh language, Icelandic and Guaraní. (Compare oral stop consonant, which block off the air completely, and fricatives, which obstruct the air with a narrow channel. Both stops and fricatives are more commonly voiceless than voiced, and are known as .)
In terms of acoustics, nasals are , which means that they do not significantly restrict the escape of air (as it can freely escape out the nose). However, nasals are also in their articulation because the flow of air through the mouth is blocked. This duality, a sonorant airflow through the nose along with an obstruction in the mouth, means that nasal occlusives behave both like sonorants and like obstruents. For example, nasals tend to pattern with other sonorants such as and , but in many languages, they may develop from or into stops.
Acoustically, nasals have bands of energy at around 200 and 2,000 Hz.
1. The symbol is commonly used to represent the dental consonant nasal as well, rather than , as it is rarely distinguished from the alveolar nasal.
Examples of languages containing nasal occlusives:
The voiced retroflex nasal is a common sound in Languages of South Asia and Australian Aboriginal languages.
The voiced palatal nasal is a common sound in European languages, such as: Spanish language , French language and Italian language , Catalan language and Hungarian , Czech language and Slovak language , Polish language , Occitan language and Portuguese , and (before a vowel) Modern Greek .
Many Germanic languages, including German language, Dutch language, English language and Swedish language, as well as varieties of Chinese such as Standard Chinese and Cantonese, have , and . Malayalam has a six-fold distinction between ; some speakers also have a .
The Nuosu language also contrasts six categories of nasals, . They are represented in romanisation by
/ɱ/ is the rarest voiced nasal to be phonemic, its mostly an allophone of other nasals before labiodentals and currently there is only 1 reported language, Kukuya language, which distinguishes and also a set of prenasalized consonants like . Yuanmen language used to have it phonemically before merging it with .
Catalan, Occitan language, Spanish, and Italian have as , and as allophones. It may also be claimed that Catalan has phonemic , at least on the basis of Central Catalan forms such as sang , although the only minimal pairs involve foreign proper nouns.
In Brazilian Portuguese and Angolan Portuguese , written , is typically pronounced as , a nasal palatal approximant, a nasal glide (in Polish language, this feature is also possible as an allophone). Semivowels in Portuguese often nasalize before and always after nasal vowels, resulting in and . What would be coda nasal occlusives in other West Iberian languages is only slightly pronounced before . Outside this environment the nasality is spread over the vowel or become a nasal diphthong ( mambembe , outside the final, only in Brazil, and mantém in all Portuguese dialects).
The Japanese kana ん, typically romanized as n and occasionally m, can manifest as one of several different nasal consonants depending on what consonant follows it; this allophone, colloquially written in IPA as , is known as the moraic nasal, per the language's moraic structure.
Welsh language has a set of voiceless nasals, , which occur predominantly as a result of nasal mutation of their voiced counterparts ().
The Mapos Buang language of New Guinea has a phonemic uvular nasal, /ɴ/, which contrasts with a velar nasal. It is extremely rare for a language to have /ɴ/ as a phoneme. The distinction also occurs in a few Inuit languages like Iñupiaq. Chamdo languages like Lamo language (Kyilwa dialect), Larong language (Tangre Chaya dialect), Drag-yab sMar (Razi dialect) have an extreme distinction of , also one of the few languages to have a .Suzuki, Hiroyuki and Tashi Nyima. 2018. Historical relationship among three non-Tibetic languages in Chamdo, TAR. Proceedings of the 51st International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (2018). Kyoto: Kyoto University.
Yanyuwa language is highly unusual in that it has a seven-way distinction between (palato-alveolar), (Velar consonant), and (Velar consonant). This may be the only language in existence that contrasts nasals at seven distinct points of articulation.
Yele language also has an extreme contrast of .
The term 'nasal occlusive' (or 'nasal stop') is generally abbreviated to nasal. However, there are also nasalized fricatives, nasalized flaps, , and , as in French, Portuguese, and Polish. In the IPA, nasal vowels and nasalized consonants are indicated by placing a tilde (~) over the vowel or consonant in question: French sang , Portuguese bom , Polish wąż .
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 (contrasts ) and Inor. A nasal lateral has been reported for some languages, Nzema language contrasts , Nemi language contrasts .
This analysis comes at the expense, in some languages, of postulating either a single nasal consonant that can only be syllabic, or a larger set of nasal vowels than oral vowels, both typologically odd situations. The way such a situation could develop is illustrated by a Jukunoid language, Wukari language. Wukari allows oral vowels in syllables like ba, mba and nasal vowels in bã, mã, suggesting that nasals become prenasalized stops before oral vowels. Historically, however, *mb became **mm before nasal vowels, and then reduced to *m, leaving the current asymmetric distribution.Larry Hyman, 1975. "Nasal states and nasal processes." In Nasalfest: Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization, pp. 249–264
In older speakers of the Tlingit language, and are allophones. Tlingit is usually described as having an unusual, perhaps unique lack of despite having five lateral obstruents; the older generation could be argued to have but at the expense of having no nasals.
The only other places in the world where this is known to occur are in Melanesia. In the central dialect of the Rotokas language of Bougainville Island, nasals are only used when imitating foreign accents. (A second dialect has a series of nasals.) The Lakes Plain languages of West Irian are similar.
The unconditioned loss of nasals, as in Puget Sound, is unusual. Currently in Korean language, and are shifting to and , but only word-initially. This started out in nonstandard dialects and was restricted to the beginning of prosodic units (a common position for fortition), but has expanded to many speakers of the standard language to the beginnings of common words even within prosodic units.Yoshida, Kenji, 2008. "Phonetic implementation of Korean 'denasalization' and its variation related to prosody". IULC Working Papers, vol. 6.
(2025). 9780199677108, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199677108 Also, among many younger speakers of Rioplatense Spanish, the palatal nasal has been lost, replaced by a cluster , as in English canyon.
Voiceless nasals
A few languages have phonemic voiceless nasal occlusives. Among them are Icelandic, Faroese language, Burmese language, Jalapa Mazatec, Kildin Sami, Welsh language, and Central Alaskan Yup'ik. Iaai language of New Caledonia has an unusually large number of them, with , along with a number of voiceless approximants.
Other kinds of nasal consonant
Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) distinguish purely nasal consonants, the nasal occlusives such as m n ng in which the airflow is purely nasal, from partial nasal consonants such as prenasalized consonants and nasal pre-stopped consonants, which are nasal for only part of their duration, as well as from nasalized consonants, which have simultaneous oral and nasal airflow. In some languages, such as Portuguese, a nasal consonant may have occlusive and non-occlusive . In general, therefore, a nasal consonant may be:
Languages without nasals
A few languages, perhaps 2%,Maddieson, Ian. 2008. Absence of Common Consonants. In: Haspelmath, Martin & Dryer, Matthew S. & Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, chapter 18. Available online at http://wals.info/feature/18 . Accessed on 2008-09-15. contain no phonemically distinctive nasals. This led Ferguson (1963) to assume that all languages have at least one primary nasal occlusive. However, there are exceptions.
Lack of phonemic nasals
When a language is claimed to lack nasals altogether, as with several Niger–Congo languagesThese languages lie in a band from western Liberia to southeastern Nigeria, and north to southern Burkina Faso. They include:
(Heine & Nurse, eds, 2008, A Linguistic Geography of Africa, p.46) or the Pirahã language of the Amazon, nasal and non-nasal or prenasalized consonants usually alternate Allophone, and it is a theoretical claim on the part of the individual linguist that the nasal is not the basic form of the consonant. In the case of some Niger–Congo languages, for example, nasals occur before only nasal vowels. Since nasal vowels are phonemic, it simplifies the picture somewhat to assume that nasalization in occlusives is allophonic. There is then a second step in claiming that nasal vowels nasalize oral occlusives, rather than oral vowels denasalizing nasal occlusives, that is, whether are phonemically without full nasals, or without prenasalized stops. Postulating underlying oral or prenasalized stops rather than true nasals helps to explain the apparent instability of nasal correspondences throughout Niger–Congo compared with, for example, Indo-European.As noted by Kay Williamson ( 1989:24).
Lack of phonetic nasals
Several of languages surrounding Puget Sound, such as Quileute (Chimakuan family), Lushootseed (Salishan family), and Makah language (Wakashan family), are truly without any nasalization whatsoever, in consonants or vowels, except in special speech registers such as baby talk or the archaic speech of mythological figures (and perhaps not even that in the case of Quileute). This is an areal feature, only a few hundred years old, where nasals became voiced stops ( became , became , became , became , became , became , became , etc.) after colonial contact. For example, "Snohomish" is currently pronounced sdohobish, but was transcribed with nasals in the first English-language records.
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