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 following links on this page go to wikipedia.org. Although more complete, wikipedia.org articles should be used with care as anyone can edit them, and are subject to vandalism and inaccuracies.

• 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.