Everything about Nasal Consonant totally explained
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 doesn't escape through the mouth as it's blocked by the tongue. Rarely, other types of consonants may be
nasalized.
Definition
Acoustically, nasal stops are
sonorants, meaning they don't restrict the escape of air and cross-linguistically are nearly always voiced. A notable exception is
Icelandic which has four 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 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're 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.
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's 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, nasal vowels are indicated by placing a tilde (~) over the vowel in question: French
sang [sɑ̃].
Languages without nasals
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's a theoretical claim on the part of the individual linguist that the nasal version isn't 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 oral stops, rather than oral vowels denasalizing nasal stops. Postulating underlying oral rather than nasal consonants helps to explain the apparent instability of nasal correspondences throughout Niger-Congo compared with, for example, Indo-European.
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 only used when imitating foreign accents (a second dialect does have nasal stops), and in some of the
Lakes Plain languages of
West Papua.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Nasal Consonant'.
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