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Velar Nasal




The velar nasal is a type of Consonant al sound, used in some Spoken Language s. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N.

As a phoneme, the velar nasal does not occur in many of the indigenous languages of the Americas, nor in a large number of European or Middle Eastern languages. While almost all languages have and , only about half have a velar nasal. As with the Voiced Velar Plosive , the relative rarity of the velar nasal is undoubtedly due to the fact that the small oral cavity used to produce Velar Consonant s 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 consonant.

In many languages that do not have the velar nasal as a phoneme, it occurs as an allophone of before velar consonants.


FEATURES


Features of the velar nasal:


The IPA symbol is a lowercase letter ''n'' with a leftward tail protruding from the bottom of the right stem of the letter. Compare n and . Both the symbol and the sound are commonly called as "eng" or "engma" and sometimes in reference to Greek , "angma". The symbol should not be confused with , the symbol for the Retroflex Nasal , which has a ''rightward''-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the ''right stem'' or with , the symbol for the Palatal Nasal , which has a ''leftward''-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the ''left stem''.


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