NASALIZATION
A. Definition
In phonetic, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is [n].
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]. An older IPA subscript diacritic [ą], called an ogonek, is still seen, especially when the vowel bears tone marks that would interfere with the superscript tilde. For example, [ą̄ ą́ ą̀ ą̂ ą̌] are more legible in most fonts than [ã̄ ã́ ã̀ ã̂ ã̌].
B. Types
1. Nasal vowels
Nasal vowels are found in many European languages, such as French, Portuguese, Breton, Polish. In these, as well as and languages found in other language families outside Europe, nasal vowels contrast with oral vowels. Many languages, however, only have oral vowels. There are occasional cases where vowels show contrasting degrees of nasality
2. Nasalized consonants
By far the most common nasalized sounds are nasal stops such as [m], [n] or [ŋ]. They may be called stops because airflow through the mouth is blocked, though air flows freely through the nose. Their non-nasal articulatory counterparts are the oral stops.
Nasalized versions of other consonant sounds also exist, though they are much rarer than either nasal stops or nasal vowels. Some of the South Arabic Languages have phonemic nasalized fricatives, such as /z̃/, which sounds something like a simultaneous [n] and [z]. 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 it was once a nasalized fricative, 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 [ȷ̃] in other Athabaskan languages. In Umbudu, phonemic /ṽ/ contrasts with(allophonically) nasalized [w̃], and so is likely to be a true fricative rather than an approximant. In Old and Middle Irish, the lenited ‹m› was a nasalized bilabial fricative. [1]
3. Nareal consonants
Besides nasalized oral fricatives, there are true nasal fricatives, called nareal fricatives, sometimes produced by people with speech defects. That is, theturbulence in the airflow characteristic of fricatives is produced not in the mouth but in the nasal cavity. A tilde plus trema diacritic is used for this in the Extensions to the IPA: [n͋] is an alveolar nareal fricative, with no airflow out of the mouth, while [v͋] is an oral fricative (a [v]) with simultaneous nareal frication. No known natural language makes use of nareal consonants.
4. Denasalization
Nasalization may be lost over time. There are also denasal sounds, which sound like nasals spoken with a head cold, but these are not used in non-pathological speech.
5. Diachronic nasalization
Nasal stops frequently nasalize surrounding vowels. Not infrequently, this can result in the addition of nasal vowels to a language. This happened in French, where most final consonants disappeared, but where in the case of final nasals, the preceding vowels became nasal, introducing a new distinction into the language. An example where this happened is vin blanc [vɛ̃ blɑ̃] ('white wine'), ultimately from Latin vinum and blancum.
SOUND CHANGE:
C. NASAL VOWEL
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. The term stands in opposition to the term "oral vowel" refers to an ordinary vowel without this nasalisation. Note that these terms can be slightly misleading as the air does not come exclusively out of the nose in nasal vowels.
In most languages, vowels that are adjacent to nasal consonants are produced partially or fully with a lowered velum in a natural process of assimilation and are therefore technically nasal, though few speakers would notice. This is the case in English: vowels preceding nasal consonants are nasalized, but there is no phonemic distinction between nasal and oral vowels (and all vowels are considered phonemically oral). However, the word "huh" is generally pronounced with a nasal vowel.
In Portuguese and French, by contrast, nasal vowels are phonemes distinct from oral vowels, since words exist which differ mainly in the nasal or oral quality of a vowel. For example, the words beau /bo/ "beautiful" and bon /bõ/ "good" are pronounced virtually the same, except that the former is oral and the latter is nasal. (More precisely, the vowel in bon is slightly more open, leading many dictionaries to transcribe it as /ɔ̃/.)
1. Suprasegmental and transitional nasal vowels
In Min Chinese, nasal vowels carry persistent air flow though both the mouth and the nose, producing an invariant and sustainable vowel quality. That is, this type of nasalization is synchronic and suprasegmental to the voicing. In contrast, nasal vowels in French or Portuguese are transitional, where the velum ends up constricting the mouth airway.
In languages which have transitional nasal vowels, it is commonly the case that there are fewer nasal vowels than oral ones. This appears to be due to a loss of distinctivity caused by the nasal articulation.
2. Phonemically and allophonically nasalized vowels
Nasalization may cause a vowel's articulation to shift. However, while nasalization due to the assimilation of a nasal consonant will tend to cause a raising of the vowel’s height, phonemically distinctive nasalization tends to lower the vowel.
3. Orthography
Languages which are written in the Latin Alphabet may indicate nasal vowels by a trailing silent n or m, as is the case in French, Portuguese, Bomana or Yoruba; others use diacritical symbols (Portuguese also employs a tilde ~ on ã, õ, before vowels; Polish, Navajo and Elfdalian use a hook underneath the letter, called an ogonek, as in ą, ę). Other languages may use a superscript n: aⁿ, eⁿ. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasal vowels are denoted by a tilde over the symbol for the vowel, as in Portuguese.
Abugida scripts, which are used for most Indian languages, use the bindu (.) symbol and its variations to denote nasal vowels and nasal junctions between consonants.
The Nastalique script used by Urdu denotes nasalisation by employing the Arabic letter "noon" but removing the dot. It is called a noon-ghunna or nasalized N. Nasalized vowels occur in classical Arabic, but not in contemporary speech or standardized Arabic. There is no orthographic way to denote the nasalization, but it is systematically taught as part of the essential rules of tajweed employed while reading the Qur’an. Nasalization usually occurs in recitation when a final N (noon) is followed by a Y (ya)
D. NASAL CONSONANT
A nasal consonant (also called nasal stop or nasal continuant) is produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, 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 lips or tongue. Rarely, other types of consonants may be nasalized.
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Acoustically, nasal stops are sonorants, meaning they do not restrict the escape of air and cross-linguistically are nearly always voiced. Two notable exceptions are Icelandic and Welsh, which have unvoiced nasal sounds. (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.)
However, nasals are also stops in their articulation 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.
| description | ||
| [m] | voiced bilabial nasal | [m] |
| [ɱ] | voiced labiodental nasal | [F] |
| [n̪] | voiced dental nasal | [n_d] |
| [n] | voiced alveolar or dental nasal: see alveolar nasal | [n] |
| [ɳ] | voiced retroflex nasal, common in Indic languages | [n`] |
| [ɲ] | voiced palatal nasal, a common sound in European languages as in: Spanish ñ; or French and Italian gn; or Catalan, Hungarian and Luganda ny; or Polish ń; or Occitan and Portuguese nh. | [J] |
| [ŋ] | voiced velar nasal, commonly written ng. | [N] |
| [ɴ] | voiced uvular nasal | [N\] |
Examples of languages containing nasal consonants:
English, German and Cantonese have [m], [n] and [ŋ]. Tamil possesses distinct letters to represent [m], [n̪], [n], [ɳ], [ɲ] and [ŋ] (ம,ந,ன,ண,ஞ,ங). Catalan, Occitan, Spanish, 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.)
The term 'nasal stop' will often be abbreviated to just "nasal". However, there are also nasal fricatives, nasal flaps, and nasal vowels, as in French, Portuguese, Catalan (dialectal feature), 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].
2. Languages without nasals
Few languages, perhaps 2.3% [1] , 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 or prenasalized 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 occur before only 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 oral stops, rather than oral vowels denasalizing nasal stops, that is, whether [mã, mba] are phonemically /mbã, mba/ without full nasal stops, or /mã, ma/ without prenasalized stops. Postulating underlying oral or prenasalized rather than nasal consonants helps to explain the apparent instability of nasal correspondences throughout Niger-Congo compared with, for example, Indo-European. [2] In older speakers of the Tlingit language, [l] and [n] are allophones. Tlingit is usually described as having an unusual, perhaps unique lack of /l/ despite having six lateral obstruents; the older generation could be argued to have /l/ but at the expense of having no nasals.
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 places in the world where this occurs is in a dialect of the Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea, where nasal stops are used only when imitating foreign accents (a second dialect does have nasal stops), and in some of the Lakes Plain languages of West Papua.
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Piggott’s (1992) account for the nasal-spreading typology (38) proposes some roblem-specific innate principles for UG: (51) Piggott’s principles of nasal harmony simplified) a. The class of blockers must constitute a natural class with the nasal consonants.
Nasals are stops, so one of those classes must be the class of stops: /m/, /n/, /p/,n /t/, which accounts for the blockers in Applecross Gaelic. Nasals are also consonantal, so depending on whether glides are consonantal, we have the classes /m/, /n/, /p/, /t/, /f/, /s/, /l/, /r/ (Warao) and /m/, /n/, /p/, /t/, /f/, /s/, /l/, /r/, /j/, /w/ (Sundanese). And nasals are sonorant, so we would expect the class /m/, /n/, /l/, /r/, /j/, /w/, i.e.
a Language in which obstruents are targets, but sonorants block!
b. The class of blockers must not be limited to sonorants. This ad-hoc exception rules out the third possibility in.
c. There is a natural class called non-approximant consonants.
This ad-hoc class consists of /m/, /n/, /p/, /t/, /f/, /s/, accounting for Ijo.
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