A nasal stop is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue. Thus, it is not the nose itself that differentiates between the nasal stops, but rather the tongue's articulation, as in oral stops (plosives). In speech there are different ways of producing a consonant. ... In phonetics, an obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing the airway. ... Clicks are stops produced with two articulatory closures in the oral cavity. ... A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Ejective consonants are a class of consonants which may contrast with aspirated or tenuis consonants in a language. ... Implosive consonants are plosives (rarely affricates) with a glottalic ingressive airstream mechanism. ... Affricate consonants begin like stops (most often an alveolar, such as or ), but release as a fricative such as or (or, a couple languages, into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel. ... Fricatives (or spirants) are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. ... A sibilant, or a strident fricative, is a type of fricative, made by speeding up air through a narrow channel and directing it over the sharp edge of the teeth. ... In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a member of a class of speech sounds that are continuants produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. ... In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another. ... In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. ... Approximants are speech sounds that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and typical consonants. ... Liquid consonants, or liquids, are approximant consonants that are not classified as semivowels (glides) because they do not correspond phonetically to specific vowels (in the way that, for example, the initial in English yes corresponds to ). The class of liquids can be divided into lateral liquids and rhotics. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-18, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Semivowels (also called semiconsonants or glides) are vowels that function phonemically as consonants. ... Laterals are L-like consonants pronounced with an occlusion made somewhere along the axis of the tongue, while air from the lungs escapes at one side or both sides of the tongue. ... Phonetic (pho-NET-ic) is a nationwide voicemail-to-text messaging service available for most digital mobile phones in which a subscriber is provided a custom voice mailbox for the purpose of receiving all incoming voice messages as actual transcribed text for reading via short messaging (also known as SMS... The International Phonetic Alphabet. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet. ... The soft palate, or velum, is the soft tissue comprising the back of the roof of the mouth. ...

Rarely, other types of consonant may be nasalized. In phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that air escapes partially or wholly through the nose during the production of the sound. ...

Acoustically, nasal stops are sonorants, meaning they do not restrict the escape of air and cross-linguistically are nearly always voiced. (Compare oral plosives, 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 phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a member of a class of speech sounds that are continuants produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. ... A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... In phonetics, an obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing the airway. ...

However, nasals are also stops in their articulaton because the flow of air through the mouth is blocked completely. This duality, a sonorant airflow through the nose along with an obstruction in the mouth, means that nasal stops behave both like sonorants and like obstruents. For the purposes of acoustic description they are generally considered sonorants, but in many languages they may develop from or into plosives.

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

List of nasal stops:

• [m] is a voiced bilabial nasal
• [ɱ] is a voiced labiodental nasal (SAMPA: [F])
• [n] is an alveolar or dental nasal: see alveolar nasal
• [ɳ] voiced retroflex nasal, common in Indic languages (SAMPA: [n`])
• [ɲ] voiced palatal nasal (SAMPA: [J]); is a common sound in European languages as in: Spanish ñ; or French and Italian gn; or Catalan and Hungarian ny; or Portuguese nh.
• [ŋ] voiced velar nasal (SAMPA: [N]), as in sing.
• [ɴ] voiced uvular nasal (SAMPA: [N])

Examples of languages containing nasal stops: The bilabial nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The labiodental nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The Extended SAM Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London. ... Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the superior teeth. ... Dentals are consonants such as t, d, n, and l articulated with either the lower or the upper teeth, or both, rather than with the gum ridge as in English. ... The alveolar nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The retroflex nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The Indo-Aryan languages form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, thus belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. ... The Extended SAM Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London. ... The palatal nasal is a type of consonant, used in some spoken languages. ... The Extended SAM Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London. ... Catalan (Català) or Valencian (Valencià) is a Romance language, the national language of Andorra and co-official in several regions of Spain. ... The velar nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The Extended SAM Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London. ... The uvular nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... The Extended SAM Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London. ...

English, German and Cantonese have [m], [n] and [ŋ] The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... This article is on all of the Yue dialects. ...

Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian have [m], [n], [ɲ] as phonemes, and [ɱ] and [ŋ] as allophones. (In several American dialects of Spanish, there is no palatal nasal, but only a palatalized nasal, [nʲ], as in English canyon.) In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. ...

The term 'nasal stop' will often be abbreviated to just "nasal". However, there are also nasal vowels, as in French, Portuguese, Yoruba, Gbe, Polish, and Ljubljana Slovene. In the IPA, nasal vowels are indicated by placing a tilde (~) over the vowel in question: French sang [sɑ̃]. A nasal vowel is a vowel that produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through the mouth and the nose. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet. ...

Very few languages contain no nasal consonants. This has led Ferguson (1963) to assume that all languages have at least one primary nasal consonant. When a language is claimed to lack nasal consonants altogether, as with several Niger-Congo languages, or the Pirahã language of the Amazon, nasal and non-nasal consonants usually alternate allophonically, and it is a theoretical claim on the part of the individual linguist that the nasal version is not the basic form of the consonant. In the case of some Niger-Congo languages, for example, nasal consonants only occur before nasal vowels. Since nasal vowels are phonemic, it simplifies the picture somewhat to assume that nasalization in stops is allophonic. There is then a second step in claiming that nasal vowels nasalize the stops, rather than oral vowels denasalizing them. Postulating nasal vowels instead of nasal consonants helps to explain the apparent instability of nasal correspondences throughout Niger-Congo compared with, for example, Indo-European.^[1] Map showing the distribution of Niger-Congo languages The Niger-Congo languages constitute one of the worlds major language families, and Africas largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. ... The Pirahã language is a language spoken by Pirahã people of Brazil. ... In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme. ...

However, several of the Chimakuan, Salish, and Wakashan languages surrounding Puget Sound, such as Quileute, Lushootseed, and Makah, are truly without any nasalization at all, 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 nasal stops became voiced plosives ([m] became [b], etc). The only other place in the world where this occurs is in a dialect of the Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea, where nasal stops are only used when imitating foreign accents. (A second dialect does have nasal stops.) The Chimakuan language family consists of two languages that are spoken in northwestern Washington, USA on the Olympic Peninsula. ... The Coast Salish are a Salishan-speaking First Nations/Native American culture that inhabited an area centered in southwestern British Columbia in Canada and western Washington in the United States for several millennia up to the time of arrival of the Europeans in the 19th century. ... Wakashan is a family of languages spoken around Vancouver Island. ... Puget Sound Puget Sound is an arm (sound) of the Pacific Ocean in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. ... Quileute is a group of Native American peoples from western Washington state in the United States. ... Lushootseed (also xwəlšucid, dxwləšúcid, Puget Salish, Puget Sound Salish, Skagit-Nisqually) is the language or dialect continuum of several Salish Native American groups of modern-day Washington state. ... A Makah woman. ... An areal feature, in linguistics, is the appearance of a given feature of typology in several unrelated languages due to the influence of geographical closeness. ... Rotokas is a language (part of the East Papuan language family) spoken by some 4000 people in Bougainville, an island to the east of New Guinea, part of Papua New Guinea. ...

See also

• List of phonetics topics

A acoustic phonetics affricate airstream mechanism Alfred C. Gimson allophone alveolar approximant alveolar consonant alveolar ejective fricative alveolar ejective alveolar flap alveolar nasal alveolar ridge alveolar trill alveolo-palatal consonant apical consonant approximant consonant articulatory phonetics aspiration auditory phonetics B back vowel bilabial click bilabial consonant bilabial ejective bilabial nasal...

Notes and references

Notes

1. ^  As noted by Williamson (1989:24).

References

• Ferguson (1963) 'Assumptions about nasals', in Greenberg (ed.) Universals of Language, pp 50-60.
• 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.