Denasalization

Template:Short description Template:Infobox IPA/core1 Template:IPA notice In phonetics, denasalization is the loss of nasal airflow in a nasal sound. That may be due to speech pathology but also occurs when the sinuses are blocked from a common cold, when it is called a nasal voice, which is not a linguistic term. Acoustically, it is the "absence of the expected nasal resonance." The symbol in the Extended IPA is Template:Angbr IPA.

When one speaks with a cold, the nasal passages still function as a resonant cavity so a denasalized nasal does not sound like a voiced oral stop , and a denasalized vowel does not sound like an oral vowel .

However, there are cases of historical or allophonic denasalization that have produced oral stops. In some languages with nasal vowels, such as Paicĩ, nasal consonants may occur only before nasal vowels; before oral vowels, prenasalized stops are found. That allophonic variation is likely to be from a historical process of partial denasalization.

Similarly, several languages around Puget Sound underwent a process of denasalization about 100 years ago. Except in special speech registers, such as baby talk, the nasals became the voiced stops . It appears from historical records that there was an intermediate stage in which the stops were prenasalized stops or post-stopped nasals .

Something similar has occurred with word-initial nasals in Korean; in some contexts, are denasalized to . The process is sometimes represented with the IPA and , which simply places the IPA denasalization diacritic on and to show the underlying phoneme.

In speech pathology, practice varies in whether Template:Angbr IPA is a partially denasalized , with Template:Angbr IPA for full denasalization, or is a target whether it is partially denasalized or a fully denasalized .

See also

• Nasalization
• Hypernasal speech