Nasal consonant

This article is about nasal stop consonants. For other types of consonants produced with nasal resonance, seeNasalization.

Inphonetics,anasal,also called anasal occlusiveornasal stopin contrast with anoral stopornasalized consonant,is anocclusiveconsonantproducedwith a loweredvelum,allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majority of consonants areoral consonants.Examples of nasals inEnglishare[n],[ŋ]and[m],in words such asnose,bringandmouth.Nasal occlusives are nearly universal in human languages. There are also other kinds ofnasal consonantsin some languages.

Definition

Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal occlusives, in which air escapes through the nose but not through the mouth, as it is blocked (occluded) by the lips or tongue. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound. Rarely, non-occlusive consonants may benasalized.

Most nasals arevoiced,and in fact, the nasal sounds[n]and[m]are among the most common sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals occur in a few languages such asBurmese,Welsh,IcelandicandGuaraní.(Compare oralstops,which block off the air completely, andfricatives,which obstruct the air with a narrow channel. Both stops and fricatives are more commonly voiceless than voiced, and are known asobstruents.)

In terms of acoustics, nasals aresonorants,which means that they do not significantly restrict the escape of air (as it can freely escape out the nose). However, nasals are alsoobstruentsin 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[r]and[l],but in many languages, they may develop from or into stops.

Acoustically, nasals have bands of energy at around 200 and 2,000 Hz.

Voiced		Voiceless
Description	IPA	Description	IPA
voiced bilabial nasal	[m]	voiceless bilabial nasal	[m̥]
voiced labiodental nasal	[ɱ]	voiceless labiodental nasal	[ɱ̊]
voiced linguolabial nasal	[n̼]	voiceless linguolabial nasal	[n̼̊]
voiced dental nasal	[n̪]	voiceless dental nasal	[n̪̊]
voiced alveolar nasal1	[n]	voiceless alveolar nasal1	[n̥]
voiced retroflex nasal	[ɳ]	voiceless retroflex nasal	[ɳ̊]
voiced palatal nasal	[ɲ]	voiceless palatal nasal	[ɲ̊]
voiced velar nasal	[ŋ]	voiceless velar nasal	[ŋ̊]
voiced uvular nasal	[ɴ]	voiceless uvular nasal	[ɴ̥]
voiced labial–alveolar nasal	[n͡m]	voiceless labial–alveolar nasal	[n̥͡m̥]
voiced labial–velar nasal	[ŋ͡m]	voiceless labial–velar nasal	[ŋ̥͡m̥]

1.^The symbol ⟨n⟩ is commonly used to represent thedentalnasal as well, rather than ⟨n̪⟩, as it is rarely distinguished from thealveolarnasal.

Examples of languages containing nasal occlusives:

The voiced retroflex nasal is[ɳ]is a common sound inLanguages of South AsiaandAustralian Aboriginal languages.

The voiced palatal nasal[ɲ]is a common sound inEuropean languages,such as:Spanish⟨ñ⟩,FrenchandItalian⟨gn⟩,CatalanandHungarian⟨ny⟩,CzechandSlovak⟨ň⟩,Polish⟨ń⟩,OccitanandPortuguese⟨nh⟩,and (before a vowel)Modern Greek⟨νι⟩.

ManyGermanic languages,includingGerman,Dutch,EnglishandSwedish,as well asvarieties of Chinesesuch asMandarinandCantonese,have/m/,/n/and/ŋ/.Malayalamhas a six-fold distinction between/m,n̪,n,ɳ,ɲ,ŋ/⟨മ, ന, ഩ, ണ, ഞ, ങ⟩;some speakers also have a /ŋʲ/.

TheNuosu languagealso contrasts six categories of nasals,/m,n,m̥,n̥,ɲ,ŋ/.They are represented in romanisation by <m, n, hm, hn, ny, ng>. Nuosu also contrasts prenasalised stops and affricates with their voiced, unvoiced, and aspirated versions.

/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 with itKukuyawhich distinguishes /m, ɱ, n, ɲ, ŋ/ and also a set of prenasalized consonants like /ᶬp̪fʰ, ᶬb̪v/.Yuanmenused to have it phonemically before merging it with /m/.

Catalan,Occitan,Spanish, and Italian have/m,n,ɲ/asphonemes,and[ɱ,ŋ]as allophones. It may also be claimed that Catalan has phonemic/ŋ/,at least on the basis ofCentral Catalanforms such assang[saŋ],although the only minimal pairs involve foreignproper nouns.Also, among many younger speakers ofRioplatense Spanish,the palatal nasal has been lost, replaced by a cluster[nj],as in Englishcanyon.

InBrazilian PortugueseandAngolan Portuguese/ɲ/,written⟨nh⟩,is typically pronounced as[ȷ̃],anasal palatal approximant,a nasal glide (inPolish,this feature is also possible as an allophone). Semivowels inPortugueseoften nasalize before and always after nasal vowels, resulting in[ȷ̃]and[w̃].What would becodanasal occlusives in otherWest Iberian languagesis only slightly pronounced beforedental consonants.Outside this environment the nasality is spread over the vowel or become a nasal diphthong (mambembe[mɐ̃ˈbẽjbi],outside thefinal,only in Brazil, andmantém[mɐ̃ˈtẽj~mɐ̃ˈtɐ̃j]in all Portuguese dialects).

TheJapanesesyllabary kanaん, typically romanized asnand occasionallym,can manifest as one of several different nasal consonants depending on what consonant follows it; this allophone, colloquially written in IPA as/N/,is known as themoraic nasal,per the language's moraic structure.

Welshhas a set of voiceless nasals, /m̥, n̥, ŋ̊/, which occur predominantly as a result ofnasal mutationof their voiced counterparts (/m, n, ŋ/).

TheMapos Buanglanguage 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 /ŋ, ɴ/ distinction also occurs in a fewInuit languageslikeIñupiaq.Chamdo languageslikeLamo(Kyilwa dialect),Larong sMar(Tangre Chaya dialect),Drag-yab sMar(Razi dialect) have an extreme distinction of /m̥ n̥ ȵ̊ ŋ̊ ɴ̥ m n ȵ ŋ ɴ/, also one of the few languages to have a [ɴ̥].

Yanyuwais highly unusual in that it has a seven-way distinction between /m, n̪, n, ɳ, ṉ/ (palato-alveolar), /ŋ̟/ (front velar), and /ŋ̠/ (back velar). This may be the only language in existence that contrasts nasals at seven distinct points of articulation.

Yélî Dnyealso has an extreme contrast of /m, mʷ, mʲ, mʷʲ, n̪, n̪͡m, n̠, n̠͡m, n̠ʲ, ŋ, ŋʷ, ŋʲ, ŋ͡m/.

The term 'nasal occlusive' (or 'nasal stop') is generally abbreviated tonasal.However, there are also nasalized fricatives, nasalized flaps,nasal glides,andnasal vowels,as in French, Portuguese, and Polish. In theIPA,nasal vowels and nasalized consonants are indicated by placing a tilde (~) over the vowel or consonant in question: Frenchsang[sɑ̃],Portuguesebom[bõ],Polishwąż[vɔ̃w̃ʂ].

Voiceless nasals

A few languages have phonemic voiceless nasal occlusives. Among them areIcelandic,Faroese,Burmese,Jalapa Mazatec,Kildin Sami,Welsh,andCentral Alaskan Yup'ik.Iaaiof New Caledonia has an unusually large number of them, with/m̥m̥ʷn̪̊ɳ̊ɲ̊ŋ̊/,along with a number ofvoiceless approximants.

Other kinds of nasal consonant

Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) distinguish purely nasal consonants, the nasal occlusives such asm n ngin which the airflow is purely nasal, from partial nasal consonants such asprenasalized consonantsand nasalpre-stopped consonants,which are nasal for only part of their duration, as well as fromnasalized consonants,which have simultaneous oral and nasal airflow.In some languages, such asPortuguese,a nasal consonant may have occlusive and non-occlusiveallophones.In general, therefore, a nasal consonant may be:

• a nasal occlusive, such as Englishm, n, ng
• nasal approximants,as innh, ão[j̃, w̃] in somePortuguese dialectsandą, ęinPolish
• prenasalized consonants, pre-stopped nasals and post-stopped nasals, as inArrernte
• nasal clickssuch asZulunq, nx, nc
• othernasalizedconsonants, such asnasalized fricatives

A nasal trill[r̃]has been described from some dialects of Romanian, and is posited as an intermediate historical step inrhotacism.However, the phonetic variation of the sound is considerable, and it is not clear how frequently it is actually trilled.Some languages contrast /r, r̃/ likeToro-tegu Dogon(contrasts /w, r, j, w̃, r̃, j̃/)andInor.A nasal lateral has been reported for some languages,Nzema languagecontrasts /l, l̃/.

Languages without nasals

A few languages, perhaps 2%,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 severalNiger–Congo languagesor thePirahã languageof the Amazon, nasal and non-nasal or prenasalized consonants usually alternateallophonically,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[mã,mba]are phonemically/mbã,mba/without full nasals, or/mã,ma/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.

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 aJukunoid language,Wukari.Wukari allows oral vowels in syllables likeba, mbaand nasal vowels inbã, 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.

In older speakers of theTlingit language,[l]and[n]are allophones. Tlingit is usually described as having an unusual, perhaps unique lack of/l/despite having fivelateral obstruents;the older generation could be argued to have/l/but at the expense of having no nasals.

Lack of phonetic nasals

Several of languages surroundingPuget Sound,such asQuileute(Chimakuan family),Lushootseed(Salishan family), andMakah(Wakashan family), are truly without any nasalization whatsoever, in consonants or vowels, except in special speech registers such asbaby talkor the archaic speech of mythological figures (and perhaps not even that in the case of Quileute). This is anareal feature,only a few hundred years old, where nasals became voiced stops ([m]became[b],[n]became[d],[ɳ]became[ɖ],[ɲ]became[ɟ],[ŋ]became[g],[ŋʷ]became[gʷ],[ɴ]became[ɢ],etc.) after colonial contact. For example, "Snohomish" is currently pronouncedsdohobish,but was transcribed with nasals in the first English-language records.

The only other places in the world where this is known to occur are in Melanesia. In the central dialect of theRotokas languageof Bougainville Island, nasals are only used when imitating foreign accents. (A second dialect has a series of nasals.) TheLakes Plain languagesof West Irian are similar.

The unconditioned loss of nasals, as in Puget Sound, is unusual. However, currently inKorean,word-initial/m/and/n/are shifting to[b]and[d].This started out in nonstandard dialects and was restricted to the beginning of prosodic units (a common position forfortition), but has expanded to many speakers of the standard language to the beginnings of common words even within prosodic units.

See also

• Oral consonant
• Nasal click
• Nasal vowel
• Nasalization
• List of phonetics topics
• Syllabic consonant

Bibliography

• Ferguson (1963) 'Assumptions about nasals', in Greenberg (ed.)Universals of Language,pp. 50–60.
• Norquest, Peter K. (2007).A phonological reconstruction of Proto-Hlai(PDF)(PhD thesis).University of Arizona.hdl:10150/194203.Archived(PDF)from the original on 2021-07-14.
• Paulian, Christiane (1975),Le Kukuya Langue Teke du Congo: phonologie, classes nominales,Peeters Publishers
• Sampson, Rodney (1999),Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance,Oxford University Press,ISBN0-19-823848-7
• Saout, J. le (1973) 'Languages sans consonnes nasales',Annales de l Université d'Abidjan,H, 6, 1, 179–205.
• Williamson, Kay(1989) 'Niger–Congo overview', in Bendor-Samuel & Hartell (eds.)The Niger–Congo Languages,3–45.