Nasal
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A nasal is a sound produced with airflow through the nose. The most important nasal phonemes in language are nasal stops (often simply called "nasals") and nasal vowels. Any other phoneme can also be nasalized, with the exception of the glottal and pharyngeal stops.
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Nasal stops
Nearly all natlangs have at least one nasal stop phoneme, with /n/ being the most common. The average number of nasal phonemes in a language is around two to four, with six being the maximum known in a natlang.
Nasal stops are most commonly voiced; the IPA has symbols only for voiced nasals, so that unvoiced nasals have to be written with a diacritic. Nevertheless, unvoiced nasals do exist in some languages, such as Burmese and Yupik. An aspirated nasal, /m_h/, is found in Aleut as a reflex of the earlier /p/ sound. This is pronounced by breathing out through the nose while pronouncing /m/, and is thus a different kind of aspiration from that which accompanies oral stops.
The IPA has symbols for the following nasals:
| IPA | X-Sampa | |
| Bilabial | /m/ | /m/ |
| Labiodental | /ɱ/ | /F/ |
| Coronal | /n/ | /n/ |
| Retroflex | /ɳ/ | /n`/ |
| Palatal | /ɲ/ | /J/ |
| Velar | /ŋ/ | /N/ (see also eng) |
| Uvular | /ɴ/ | /N\/ |
All these nasals are voiced by default; voiceless versions are formed with a ring diacritic (n̥ or ŋ̊) (in X-Sampa, _0).
Nasal vowels
Nasal vowels are vowels produced with nasal airflow. In many languages, such as English, nasal vowels are allophones: all vowels are nasalized when they precede a nasal consonant. Some languages, such as French, Portuguese and Polish have phonemic nasal vowels.
There is a universal that states that a language with phonemic nasal vowels also has oral vowels.
The IPA does not have separate symbols for nasal vowels; they are written with a diacritic. In orthography, nasal vowels are often represented with a tilde.
Nasalized clicks
All clicks can be nasalized. In the IPA and X-Sampa, this is represented with a nasalization diacritic on the symbol for the oral click; in Z-Sampa a different system is used, whereby the click diacritic _! is placed after the symbol for an oral stop to produce an oral click, or after the symbol for a nasal stop to produce a nasal click.
Nasal release
Nasal release is the process of forming a plosive (that is, a complete stoppage of airflow) and releasing it by letting air out through the nose. A nasally released plosive therefore sounds very similar to a plosive followed by the nasal at the same place of articulation.
Nasal release is indicated in the IPA with a superscript /n/ (for example, /dⁿ/), and in X-Sampa by the diacritic _n.
Nasal escape
The escape of some airflow through the nose as well as the mouth. It is a characteristic of the speech of people with cleft palate.
In Z-Sampa, nasal escape is indicated with the diacritic _;. The most common sounds of this type, nareal fricatives, are correctly written as nasal stops with the "nasal escape" diacritic, not as fricatives.
