phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

, denasalization is the loss of nasal airflow in a nasal sound. That may be due to speech pathology but also occurs when the

sinuses Paranasal sinuses are a group of four paired air-filled spaces that surround the nasal cavity. The maxillary sinuses are located under the eyes; the frontal sinuses are above the eyes; the ethmoidal sinuses are between the eyes and the sphenoi ...

are blocked from a

common cold The common cold, or the cold, is a virus, viral infectious disease of the upper respiratory tract that primarily affects the Respiratory epithelium, respiratory mucosa of the human nose, nose, throat, Paranasal sinuses, sinuses, and larynx. ...

, 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 . 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 Puget Sound ( ; ) is a complex estuary, estuarine system of interconnected Marine habitat, marine waterways and basins located on the northwest coast of the U.S. state of Washington (state), Washington. As a part of the Salish Sea, the sound ...

underwent a process of denasalization about 100 years ago. Except in special speech registers, such as

baby talk Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child or infant. It is also called caretaker speech, infant-directed speech (IDS), child-directed speech (CDS), child-directed language (CDL), caregiver register, parente ...

, 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 is a partially denasalized , with for full denasalization, or is a target whether it is partially denasalized or a fully denasalized .

References

{{reflist Phonetics Nasalization

See also

References