Nasal vowel

A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ (help·info) or Amoy . By contrast, oral vowels are produced without nasalization. In a stricter sense, nasal vowels shall not be confused with nasalised vowels. A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ (help·info) or Amoy . By contrast, oral vowels are produced without nasalization. In a stricter sense, nasal vowels shall not be confused with nasalised vowels. Nasalised vowels are vowels under the influence of neighbouring sounds. For instance, the of the word hand is affected by the following nasal consonant. In most languages, vowels adjacent to nasal consonants are produced partially or fully with a lowered velum in a natural process of assimilation and are therefore technically nasal, but few speakers would notice. That is the case in English: vowels preceding nasal consonants are nasalized, but there is no phonemic distinction between nasal and oral vowels (and all vowels are considered phonemically oral). However, the words 'huh?' and 'uh-huh' are pronounced with a nasal vowel, as is the negative 'unh-unh'. The nasality of nasal vowels, however, is a distinctive feature of certain languages. In other words, a language may contrast oral vowels and nasalised vowels phonemically. Linguists make use of minimal pairs to decide whether or not the nasality is of linguistic importance. In French, for instance, nasal vowels are distinct from oral vowels, and words can differ by this vowel quality. The words beau /bo/ 'beautiful' and bon /bõ/ 'good' are a minimal pair that contrasts primarily the vowel nasalization, even if the /õ/ from bon is slightly more open. Portuguese behaves similarly with minimal pairs as vim /vĩ/ 'I came' and vi /vi/ 'I saw', except /ĩ/ and /i/ are of same vowel height. Portuguese also allows nasal diphthongs that contrast with their oral counterparts, like the minimal pair sem /sẽj̃/ 'without' and sei /sej/ 'I know'. Although there are French loanwords into English with nasal vowels like croissant , there is no expectation that an English speaker would nasalize the vowels to the same extent that French or Portuguese speakers do. Likewise, pronunciation keys in English dictionaries do not always indicate nasalization of French loanwords. Nasalization as a result of the assimilation of a nasal consonant tends to cause a raising of vowel height; phonemically distinctive nasalization tends to lower the vowel. In most languages, vowels of all heights are nasalized indiscriminately, but preference occurs in some language, such as for high vowels in Chamorro and low vowels in Thai. A few languages, such as Palantla Chinantec, contrast lightly nasalized and heavily nasalized vowels. They may be contrasted in print by doubling the IPA diacritic for nasalization: ⟨ẽ⟩ vs ⟨ẽ⟩̃}}. Bickford & Floyd (2006) combine the tilde with the ogonek: ⟨ẽ⟩ vs ⟨ę̃⟩. (The ogonek is sometimes used in an otherwise IPA transcription to avoid conflict with tone diacritics above the vowels.)