Nasal vowel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through the mouth and the nose.
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 French, by contrast, nasal vowels are phonemes distinct from oral vowels, since words exist which differ only in the nasal or oral quality of a vowel. For example, the words beau "beautiful" and bon "good" are pronounced the same, except the vowel in bon is nasal and the vowel in beau is oral.
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[edit] 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.
[edit] Orthography
Languages which are written in the Latin alphabet may indicate nasal vowels by a following n or m, as is the case in French, Portuguese, or Yoruba; others use diacritical symbols (Portuguese also employs a tilde ~ on ã, õ, before vowels; Polish and Navajo use a hook underneath the letter, called an ogonek, as in ą, ę). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasal vowels are denoted by a tilde over the symbol for the vowel, as in Portuguese.
[edit] Example languages
Languages which use phonemic nasal vowels include, among others:
- Choctaw
- French
- Gbe languages
- Guaraní
- Kashubian
- Min Nan (including Taiwanese)
- Navajo
- Nheengatu
- Paicĩ (an unusually large number of nasal vowels)
- Polish
- Proto-Slavic
- Portuguese (It can be argued that the nasal vowels of this language are allophones of some of its oral vowels.)
- Yorùbá
- Bengali
- Hindi
- Punjabi
- Älvdalsmål
