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. Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

In the International Phonetic Alphabet nasalization is indicated by printing a tilde above the symbol for the sound to be nasalized: [ã] is the nasalized equivalent of [a], and [ṽ] is the nasalized equivalent of [v]. The International Phonetic Alphabet. ... The tilde (~) is a grapheme which has several uses, described below. ...

Nasalized sounds are most often nasal vowels, as in French and Polish, or a Texas "twang". 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. ... ...

However, there are also phonemically nasalized consonants. Some of the South Arabic languages have nasalized fricatives, such as [z̃]. The sound written r in Mandarin has an odd history; for example, it has been borrowed into Japanese as both [z] and [n]. It seems likely that this was a nasalized fricative at one time, perhaps a palatal [ʝ̃]. In the Hupa velar nasal /ŋ/, the tongue often does not make full contact, resulting in a nasalized approximant, [ɰ̃]. This is cognate with a nasalized [j̃] in other Athabaskan languages. In Umbundu, phonemic [ṽ] contrasts with allophonically nasalized [w̃], and so is likely to be a true fricative rather than an approximant. In human language, a phoneme is the basic theoretical unit that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes. ... 12th century Hebrew Bible script The Semitic languages are a family of languages spoken by more than 250 million people across much of the Middle East, where they originated, and North and East Africa. ... Mandarin (Traditional: 北方話, Simplified: 北方话, Hanyu Pinyin: BÄ›ifānghuà [listen â–¶(?)], lit. ... A smoky day at the Sugar Bowl Edward Curtis, photographer The Hupa are an Athabaskan tribe which inhabit northwestern California. ... The velar nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... Cognates are words that have a common origin. ... Athabaskan or Athabascan (also Athapascan or Athapaskan) is the name of a large group of distantly related Native American peoples, also known as the Athabasca Indians or Athapaskes, and of their language family. ...

See also

• nasal consonant
• nasal vowel