Nasal (definition)

A nasal is a sound that involves passage of air through the nasal cavity, typically by the lowering of the velum away from the back wall of the vocal tract. This lowering of the velum often causes coarticulation effects in surrounding sounds; nasalization is typically indicated with a tilde (~) above the IPA symbol.

The nasal sounds of English include [m, n, ŋ]. The nasal sounds of Gaelic include [m, n, N, ŋ, ɲ] and the nasal vowels [ã, ẽ, ĩ, õ, ũ, ɤ̃, ɯ̃, ɛ̃, ɔ̃, ɪ̃].

See Also

• Nasalization (definition)
• Sonorant (definition)
• Consonant (definition)
• Manner of Articulation (definition)
• Sounds of Scottish Gaelic

External Links

• http://akerbeltz.org/index.php?title=l_n_r
• Interactive IPA Charts

The link below takes you away from the Gaelic Wiki to Wikipedia. Since wikipedia pages can be edited by anyone, they often contain inaccurate information. So be careful!

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_consonant
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_vowel
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cavity
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet

References

• Crystal, David. (1997) A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
• Ladefoged, Peter (1993) A Course in Phonetics Third Edition. London: Harcourt Press.
• Matthews, P. H. (1997) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.