Nasal consonant: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

A nasal is a sound produced when the air is allowed to escape through the nose, while its oral passage may be blocked by the lips or tongue (a nasal stop) or opened (a nasal vowel). Nasal stops are often called simply "nasals".

Here are some nasal consonants:

• [m] is a voiced bilabial nasal
• [ɱ] is a voiced labiodental nasal (SAMPA [F])
• [n] is an alveolar or dental nasal: see voiced alveolar nasal
• [ɳ] voiced retroflex nasal, common in Indic languages
• [ɲ] voiced palatal nasal (SAMPA [J]); is a common sound in European languages as in: Spanish ñ; or French and Italian gn; or Catalan and Hungarian ny; or Portuguese nh.
• [ŋ] voiced velar nasal (SAMPA [N]), as in sing.
• [ɴ] voiced uvular nasal

English, German and Cantonese have [m], [n] and [ŋ]

French has [m], [n] and [ɲ], as well as [ŋ] in a few recent loanwords (such as le parking).

Catalan and Italian have [m], [n], [ɲ] as phonemes, and [ŋ] as an allophone.

Spanish has [m], [n], [ɲ] as phonemes, and [ɱ] and [ŋ] as allophones.

Mohawk has only one nasal phoneme /n/, and Rotokas, a language of Papua New Guinea, has none (although nasals do show up allophonically in that language).

French, Portuguese, and Polish have nasal vowels. In IPA, nasal vowels are indicated by placing a tilde (~) over the vowel in question. So French sang = /sã/.