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A nasal stop, also called a nasal occlusive, nasal continuant, or often just a nasal, is a type of nasal consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal stops in English are [n] and [m], in words such as nose and mouth.

Definition

Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal stops, where air escapes through the nose but not through the mouth, as it is blocked by the lips or tongue. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound. Rarely, non-stop consonants may be nasalized.

Most nasals are voiced, and in fact the nasal sounds [n] and [m] are among the most common sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals do occur in a few languages, such as Burmese, Welsh and Guaraní. (Compare oral plosives, which block off the air completely, and fricatives, which obstruct the air with a narrow channel. Both plosives and fricatives are more commonly voiceless than voiced, and are known as obstruents.)

In terms of acoustics, nasal stops are sonorants, meaning that they do not significantly restrict the escape of air (as it can freely escape out the nose). 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 example, nasal stops tend to pattern with other sonorants such as [r] and [l], 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.

1. ^ The symbol ⟨n⟩ is commonly used to represent the dental nasal as well, rather than ⟨n̪⟩, as it is rarely distinguished from the alveolar nasal.

Examples of languages containing nasal stops:

The voiced retroflex nasal is [ɳ] is a common sound in Indic languages.

The voiced palatal nasal [ɲ] is a common sound in European languages, such as: Spanish ⟨ñ⟩, French and Italian ⟨gn⟩, Catalan or Hungarian ⟨ny⟩, Czech and Slovak ⟨ň⟩, Polish ⟨ń⟩, Occitan and Portuguese ⟨nh⟩ or Serbo-Croatian ⟨nj⟩.

German and Cantonese have [m], [n] and [ŋ], while English also possess [ɱ] as allophone. 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. Nevertheless, in several American dialects of Spanish, there is no palatal nasal but only a palatalized nasal, [nʲ], as in English canyon.

In Brazilian Portuguese and Angolan Portuguese [ɲ], written ⟨nh⟩, is typically pronounced as [ȷ̃], that is, as a nasal palatal approximant, a nasal glide (in Polish this feature is also possible as an allophone). Semivowels in Portuguese often nasalize before and always after nasal vowels, resulting in [ȷ̃] and [w͂], and nasal stops when at the end of syllables are only slightly pronounced before dental consonants, outside this environment the nasality is spread over the vowel or become a nasal diphthong (e.g. mambembe [mɐ̃ˈbẽjbi], outside the end of the word, in most Brazilian dialects only, and lámen [ˈlamẽj] in all dialects of the Portuguese language).

The term 'nasal stop' will often be abbreviated to just "nasal". However, there are also nasal fricatives, nasal flaps, nasal glides, and nasal vowels, as in French, Portuguese, Catalan (dialectal feature), Yoruba, Gbe, Polish, Ljubljana Slovene, Japanese (as an allophone), Tupí and Guaraní. In the IPA, nasal vowels and nasalized consonants are indicated by placing a tilde (~) over the vowel or consonant in question: French sang [sɑ̃], Portuguese bom [bõ].

Voiceless nasals

A few languages have phonemic voiceless nasal stops. Among them are Icelandic, Burmese, Jalapa Mazatec, Kildin Sami, Welsh, and Central Alaskan Yup'ik. Iaai of New Caledonia has a unusually large number of them, with /m̥ m̥ʷ n̪̥ ɳ̊  ɲ̊ ŋ̊/.

Languages without nasals

Few languages, perhaps 2.3%,^[1] contain no phonemically distinctive nasal stops. This led Ferguson (1963) to assume that all languages have at least one primary nasal stop. When a language is claimed to lack nasal stops altogether, as with several Niger–Congo languages^[2] 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 stops 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 stops helps to explain the apparent instability of nasal correspondences throughout Niger–Congo compared with, for example, Indo-European.^[3] However, this comes at the expense, in some languages, of postulating either a nasal stop that can only be syllabic, or a larger set of nasal vowels than oral vowels, both typologically odd situations. The way such a situation could develop is illustrated by the Jukunoid language Wukari. Wukari allows oral vowels in syllables like ba, mba and nasal vowels in bã, mã, suggesting that nasal stops become prenasalized stops before oral vowels. Historically, however, *mb became **mm before nasal vowels, and then reduced to *m, leaving the current asymmetric distribution.^[4] 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 nasal stops.

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 the central 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).

See also

• Oral consonant
• Nasal click
• Nasal vowel
• Nasalization
• List of phonetics topics

Notes and references

Notes

References

• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19814-8. 
• Ferguson (1963) 'Assumptions about nasals', in Greenberg (ed.) Universals of Language, pp 50–60.
• Saout, J. le (1973) 'Languages sans consonnes nasales', Annales de l Université d'Abidjan, H, 6, 1, 179–205.
• Williamson, Kay (1989) 'Niger–Congo overview', in Bendor-Samuel & Hartell (eds.) The Niger–Congo Languages, 3–45.

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