Nasalized vowels

The production and transcription of nasalized vowels

As we have seen, in cases where a nasal is syllable final, nasality starts before oral closure, giving rise to a period of oro-nasal airflow. The result of this is typically a nasalized vowel, which can be transcribed as a vowel symbol + the diacritic [˜], resulting in transcriptions like  , ‘hang’,  , ‘soon’, and  , ‘men’.

The same kinds of symbols are used for vowels in languages which use the distinction between oral and nasalized vowels lexically, such as French and Portuguese. It is often said in fact that English does not ‘have’ nasalized vowels, because the vowels that we can find with oro-nasal airflow are different from languages which ‘do have’ nasalized vowels in two respects. The first is that in English, the occurrence of nasalization in vowels is predictable from context and therefore is not seen, especially in phonemic accounts of English, as being significant for meaning. The second difference is that in French and Portuguese (and indeed other languages) nasalized vowels are more heavily nasalized than in English: that is to say, the velum is lower than in English, allowing more airflow through the nasal cavity.