Nasalization

In phonetics, 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 . In phonetics, 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 . In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasalization is indicated by printing a tilde diacritic .mw-parser-output .monospaced{font-family:monospace,monospace}U+0303 ◌̃ .mw-parser-output .smallcaps{font-variant:small-caps}COMBINING TILDE (HTML ̃) above the symbol for the sound to be nasalized: is the nasalized equivalent of , and is the nasalized equivalent of . A subscript diacritic , called an ogonek or nosinė, is sometimes seen, especially when the vowel bears tone marks that would interfere with the superscript tilde. For example, are more legible in most fonts than . Nasal vowels are found in over 20% of the languages around the world, such as French, Polish, Portuguese, Breton, Gheg-Albanian, Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Hmong, Hokkien, Yoruba and Cherokee. Those nasal vowels contrast with their corresponding oral vowels. Nasality is usually seen as a binary feature, although surface variation in different degrees of nasality caused by neighboring nasal consonants has been observed. There are occasional languages, such Palantla Chinantec, where vowels seem to exhibit three contrastive degrees of nasality, although Ladefoged and Maddieson believe that the slightly nasalized vowels are better described as an oro-nasal diphthong. By far the most common nasal sounds are nasal consonants such as , or . Most nasal consonants are occlusives, and airflow through the mouth is blocked and redirected through the nose. Their oral counterparts are the stops. Nasalized versions of other consonant sounds also exist but are much rarer than either nasal occlusives or nasal vowels. Some South Arabian languages use phonemic nasalized fricatives, such as /z̃/, which sounds something like a simultaneous and . The Middle Chinese consonant 日 (; in modern Standard Chinese) has an odd history; for example, it has evolved into and (or and respectively, depending on accents) in Standard Chinese; / and in Hokkien; / and / while borrowed into Japan. It seems likely that it was once a nasalized fricative, perhaps a palatal . In Coatzospan Mixtec, fricatives and affricates are nasalized before nasal vowels even when they are voiceless. In the Hupa, the velar nasal /ŋ/ often has the tongue not make full contact, resulting in a nasalized approximant, . That is cognate with a nasalized palatal approximant] in other Athabaskan languages. In Umbundu, phonemic /ṽ/ contrasts with the (allophonically) nasalized approximant 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. Sundanese has an allophonic nasalized glottal stop ; nasalized stops can occur only with pharyngeal articulation or lower, or they would be simple nasals. Nasal flaps are common allophonically. Many West African languages have a nasal flap (or ) as an allophone of /ɾ/ before a nasal vowel; Pashto, however, has a phonemic nasal retroflex lateral flap.