Nasalization
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
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) 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 [n].
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasalization is indicated by printing a tilde diacritic U+0303 ◌̃ COMBINING TILDE above the symbol for the sound to be nasalized: [ã] is the nasalized equivalent of [a], and [ṽ] is the nasalized equivalent of [v]. Although not IPA, a subscript diacritic [ą], called an ogonek, is sometimes seen, particularly from Americanists, especially when the vowel bears tone marks that would stack with the superscript tilde. For example, ⟨ą̄ ą́ ą̀ ą̂ ą̌⟩ are more legible than stacked ⟨ã̄ ã́ ã̀ ã̂ ã̌⟩.
Nasal vowels
Many languages have nasal vowels to different degrees, but only a minority of world languages around the world have nasal vowels as contrasting phonemes. That is the case, among others, of French, Portuguese, Hindustani, Kashmiri, Bengali, Nepali, Breton, Gheg Albanian, 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.
Degree of nasality
There are languages, such as in Palantla Chinantec, where vowels seem to exhibit three contrastive degrees of nasality: oral e.g.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Nasalization” as 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. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 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. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1606582. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nasalization” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.