This article will be permanently flagged as inappropriate and made unaccessible to everyone. Are you certain this article is inappropriate? Excessive Violence Sexual Content Political / Social
Email Address:
Article Id: WHEBN0000518842 Reproduction Date:
ŋ
N
The velar nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ng in English sing. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ŋ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N. The IPA symbol ⟨ŋ⟩ is similar to ⟨ɳ⟩, the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem, and to ⟨ɲ⟩, the symbol for the palatal nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the left stem. Both the IPA symbol and the sound are commonly called 'eng' or 'engma'.
As a phoneme, the velar nasal does not occur in many of the indigenous languages of the Americas or in a large number of European or Middle Eastern or Caucasian languages, but it is extremely common in Australian Aboriginal languages. While almost all languages have /m/ and /n/, /ŋ/ is rarer.[1] Only half of the 469 languages surveyed in Anderson (2008) had a velar nasal phoneme; as a further curiosity, a large proportion of them limits its occurrence to the syllable coda. In many languages that do not have the velar nasal as a phoneme, it occurs as an allophone of /n/ before velar consonants.
An example of a language that has neither a phonemic nor allophonic velar nasal is Russian, in which /n/ is pronounced as laminal denti-alveolar [n̪] even before velar consonants.[2]
As with the voiced velar stop /ɡ/, the relative rarity of the velar nasal is because the small oral cavity, used to produce velar consonants, makes it more difficult for voicing to be sustained. It also makes it much more difficult to allow air to escape through the nose, as is required for a nasal.
There is also a post-velar nasal (also called pre-uvular) in some languages. For pre-velar nasal (also called post-palatal), see palatal nasal.
Features of the velar nasal:
Hong Kong, Simplified Chinese characters, Singapore, Pinyin, Hanja
Ѐ, Yus, Russia, Greek alphabet, Microsoft
A, O, É, U, I
Manner of articulation, Labial consonant, Palatal consonant, Epiglottal consonant, Phonation
Ɲ, International Phonetic Alphabet, Manner of articulation, Place of articulation, Spanish language
Å, Catalan language, Unicode, Voiceless postalveolar fricative, Ñ
Place of articulation, Manner of articulation, ɾ̼, International Phonetic Alphabet, Sibilant consonant
Voiceless velar fricative, Voiceless palatal fricative, Open-mid front unrounded vowel, Fortis and lenis, Front vowel