In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is [n].
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasalization is indicated by printing a tilde diacritic U+0303◌̃COMBINING TILDE above the symbol for the sound to be nasalized: [ã] is the nasalized equivalent of [a], and [ṽ] is the nasalized equivalent of [v]. Although not IPA, a subscript diacritic [ą], called an ogonek, is sometimes seen, particularly from Americanists, especially when the vowel bears tone marks that would stack with the superscript tilde. For example, ⟨ą̄ą́ą̀ą̂ą̌⟩ are more legible than stacked ⟨ã̄ã́ã̀ã̂ã̌⟩.
Hidden categories:
Articles with short description
Short description is different from Wikidata
Articles needing additional references from June 2010
