Nasal consonant facts for kids

A nasal consonant is a special type of consonant sound. When you make a nasal sound, air comes out through your nose. This happens because your velum (the soft part at the back of the roof of your mouth) lowers. At the same time, something in your mouth, like your tongue or lips, blocks the air from leaving through your mouth.

You use nasal consonants all the time! For example, the 'm' sound in the word mom and the 'n' sound in nose are nasal consonants in English.

What Are Nasal Consonants?

Most nasal consonants are called nasal stops. This means that air is completely blocked from leaving your mouth by your lips or tongue. However, the air can still flow freely out of your nose.

Most nasal sounds are voiced. This means your vocal cords vibrate when you make the sound. The 'm' and 'n' sounds are very common in languages all over the world. Some languages, like Burmese and Welsh, also use voiceless nasals. For these, your vocal cords do not vibrate.

Nasal sounds are interesting because they act like two different types of sounds. They are sonorants because air flows easily through your nose. But they are also stops because air is completely blocked in your mouth.

Types of Nasal Sounds

There are many different nasal consonants, depending on where in your mouth the air is blocked. Here are some common ones:

• Bilabial nasal ([m]): Made by blocking air with both lips, like in mom.
• Alveolar nasal ([n]): Made by blocking air with your tongue against the ridge behind your front teeth, like in nose.
• Velar nasal ([ŋ]): Made by blocking air with the back of your tongue against the soft palate, like the 'ng' sound in sing.

Many languages use these sounds. For example, the voiced retroflex nasal ([ɳ]) is common in Indo-Aryan languages. The voiced palatal nasal ([ɲ]) is found in many European languages. You can hear it in Spanish ñ (like in piñata) or French and Italian gn (like in lasagna).

While "nasal stop" is the most common type, there are other nasal sounds too. These include nasal fricatives, nasal flaps, nasal glides, and nasal vowels. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a tilde (~) is placed over a vowel to show it is nasal, like in the French word sang (meaning 'blood').

Some languages that use voiceless nasal consonants include Icelandic, Burmese, Jalapa Mazatec, and Welsh.

• Ferguson (1963) 'Assumptions about nasals', in Greenberg (ed.) Universals of Language, pp 50–60.
• Saout, J. le (1973) 'Languages sans consonnes nasales', Annales de l Université d'Abidjan, H, 6, 1, 179–205.
• Williamson, Kay (1989) 'Niger–Congo overview', in Bendor-Samuel & Hartell (eds.) The Niger–Congo Languages, 3–45.

See also

In Spanish: Consonante nasal para niños