Velar Nasal

The velar nasal is the sound of ng in English sing. It is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ŋ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N.

As a phoneme, the velar nasal does not occur in many of the indigenous languages of the Americas or in a large number of European or Middle Eastern languages, but it is extremely common in Australian Aboriginal languages. While almost all languages have /m/ and /n/, /ŋ/ is rarer. Only half of the 469 languages surveyed in Anderson (2008) had a velar nasal phoneme; as a further curiosity, a large proportion of them limits its occurrence to the syllable coda.

As with the voiced velar stop /ɡ/, the relative rarity of the velar nasal is because the small oral cavity, used to produce velar consonants, makes it more difficult for voicing to be sustained. It also makes it much more difficult to allow air to escape through the nose, as is required for a nasal.

In many languages that do not have the velar nasal as a phoneme, it occurs as an allophone of other nasals before velar consonants.