Nasal Consonant - Definition

Definition

Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal occlusives, where 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 be nasalized.

Most nasals are voiced, and in fact the nasal sounds and are among the most common sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals do occur in a few languages, such as Burmese, Welsh and Guaraní. (Compare oral stops, 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 obstruents.)

In terms of acoustics, nasals are sonorants, meaning that they do not significantly restrict the escape of air (as it can freely escape out the nose). However, nasals are also obstruents 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 ⟨n⟩ is commonly used to represent the dental nasal as well, rather than ⟨n̪⟩, as it is rarely distinguished from the alveolar nasal.

Examples of languages containing nasal occlusives:

The voiced retroflex nasal is is a common sound in Languages of India.

The voiced palatal nasal is a common sound in European languages, such as: Spanish ⟨ñ⟩, French and Italian ⟨gn⟩, Catalan or Hungarian ⟨ny⟩, Czech and Slovak ⟨ň⟩, Polish ⟨ń⟩, Occitan and Portuguese ⟨nh⟩ or Serbo-Croatian ⟨nj⟩.

German and Cantonese have, and, while English also possess as allophone. Tamil possesses distinct letters to represent, and (ம,ந,ன,ண,ஞ,ங).

Catalan, Occitan, Spanish, and Italian have, as phonemes, and and as allophones. Nevertheless, in several American dialects of Spanish, there is no palatal nasal but only a palatalized nasal, as in English canyon.

In Brazilian Portuguese and Angolan Portuguese, written ⟨nh⟩, is typically pronounced as, that is, as a nasal palatal approximant, a nasal glide (in Polish 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 dental consonants, outside this environment the nasality is spread over the vowel or become a nasal diphthong (e.g. mambembe, outside the final, only in Brazil, and mantém in all Portuguese dialects).

The term 'nasal occlusive' (or 'nasal stop') is generally abbreviated to nasal. However, there are also nasalized fricatives, nasalized flaps, nasal glides, and nasal vowels, 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 .