The voiceless nasal glottal approximant is a type of consonantal sound, a nasal approximant, used in some oral languages. The symbol in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...

that represents this sound is , that is, an ''h'' with a

tilde The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin '' titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) i ...

Occurrence

The ''h'' sound is nasalized in several languages, apparently due to a connection between glottal and nasal sounds called '' rhinoglottophilia''. Examples of languages where the only h-like sound is nasalized are Krim,

Lisu Lisu may refer to: *Lisu people, an ethnic group of Southeast Asia *Lisu language, spoken by the Lisu people * Old Lisu Alphabet or Fraser Alphabet *Lisu syllabary * Lisu (Unicode block), the block of Unicode characters for the Lisu language. *Lisu ...

, and Pirahã. More rarely, a language will contrast oral and nasal . Two such languages are neighboring Bantu languages of Angola and Namibia, Kwangali and

Mbukushu Mbukushu is a traditional Kavango kingdom in what is today Namibia. Its people speak the Mbukushu language Mbukushu or Thimbukushu is a Bantu language spoken by 45,000 people along the Okavango River in Namibia, where it is a national language, ...

. In these languages, vowels following are nasalized, though nasal vowels do not occur elsewhere. A distinction is also reported from Wolaytta, though in that case the nasal is rare.

Notes

References

* * *

External links

* Approximant-fricative consonants Glottal consonants Nasal consonants Pulmonic consonants {{phonetics-stub