CONSONANTS: NASALS

Nasals are consonants that are formed by blocking the oral passage and allowing the air to escape through the nose. Present-Day English has three nasals, all of which are voiced (vocal cords vibrating during the articulation of the nasal). (The nasals, the lateral /l/, the retroflex /r/, and the semivowels /w/ and /j/ are sometimes called the resonants.)

1. /m/ (the phoneme spelled m in mail): (voiced) bilabial nasal.
2. /n/ (the phoneme spelled n in nail): (voiced) alveolar nasal.
3. /h/ (the phoneme spelled ng in sing): (voiced) velar nasal.

Nasal consonant

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).

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.)

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

·         is a voiced labiodental nasal (SAMPA: F)

·         [n] is an alveolar or dental nasal: see alveolar nasal

·         voiced retroflex nasal, common in Indic languages (SAMPA: n`)

·         voiced palatal nasal (SAMPA: J); is a common sound in European languages as in: Spanish 쯳pan>; or French and Italian gn; or Catalan and Hungarian ny; or Portuguese nh.

·         [ŋ] voiced velar nasal (SAMPA: N), as in sing.

·         voiced uvular nasal (SAMPA: N)