Velar nasal

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The velar nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ŋ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N.

As a phoneme, the velar nasal does not occur in many of the indigenous languages of the Americas, nor in a large number of European or Middle Eastern languages. While almost all languages have /m/ and /n/, only about half have a velar nasal. As with the voiced velar plosive, the relative rarity of the velar nasal is undoubtedly due to the fact that the small oral cavity used to produce velar consonants makes it more difficult for voicing to be sustained. It also makes it much more difficult to allow air to escape through the nose as is required for a nasal consonant.

In many languages that do not have the velar nasal as a phoneme, it occurs as an allophone of /n/ before velar consonants.

Features

Features of the velar nasal:

Its manner of articulation is stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract.
Its place of articulation is velar which means it is articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the velum).
Its phonation type is voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.
It is a nasal consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the nose.
It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

The IPA symbol is a lowercase letter n with a leftward tail protruding from the bottom of the right stem of the letter. Compare n and ŋ. Both the symbol and the sound are commonly called as "eng" or "engma" and sometimes in reference to Greek, "angma". The symbol ŋ should not be confused with ɳ, the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem or with ɲ, the symbol for the palatal nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the left stem.

Varieties of [ŋ]

IPA	Description
ŋ	plain ŋ
ŋ̊	voiceless ŋ
ŋ̍	syllabic ŋ
ŋ̈	breathy voiced ŋ
ŋ̃	creaky voiced ŋ
ŋʷ	labialized ŋ

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Aleut		chaang		'five'
Bai	Dali dialect	?		'fish'
Cantonese		梗/gang2		'flower stem'	See Standard Cantonese
Catalan		sa'ng''	[saŋ]	'blood'	See Catalan phonology
Chukchi		ңыроқ		'two'
Czech		tank		'tank'	See Czech phonology
Dinka		ŋa		'who'
Dutch		angst	[ɑŋst]	'fear'	See Dutch phonology
English		sing		'sing'	Restricted to the syllable coda. See English phonology
Fijian		gone		'child'
Finnish		langan		'of the thread'	See Finnish phonology
French		parking		'parking lot'	See French phonology
Galician		unha	[ˈuŋa]	'one', 'a' (feminine)
German		lang		'long'	See German phonology
Greek		αποτυγχάνω		'I fail (to fail)'	See Modern Greek phonology
Hindi		रङ्ग	[rəŋg]	'color'	See Hindi-Urdu phonology
Hungarian		ing		'shirt'	See Hungarian phonology
Icelandic		göng		?	See Icelandic phonology
Indonesian		bangun	[baŋun]	'wake up'
Irish		ceann carrach		'a scabbed one'	See Irish phonology
Italian		anche		'also'	See Italian phonology
Itelmen		қниң	[qniŋ]	'one'
Japanese	Standard	南極/nankyoku		'the South Pole'	See Japanese phonology
Japanese	Eastern dialects	鍵/kagi		'key'	See Japanese phonology
Ket		аяң	[ajaŋ]	'to damn'
Korean		방/bang		'room'	See Korean phonology
Mandarin		北京/Běijīng		'Beijing'	See Standard Mandarin
Nivkh		ңамг		'seven'
Norwegian		gang		'hallway'	See Norwegian phonology
Polish		bank		'bank'	See Polish phonology
Occitan	Provençal	vin		'wine'
Seri		comcáac		'Seri people'
Spanish		domingo	[d̪o̞ˈmiŋgo̞]	'Sunday'	See Spanish phonology
Swahili		ng'ombe	[ŋɔmbɛ]	'cow'
Swedish		bank	[baŋkʰ]	'bank'	See Swedish phonology
Vietnamese		ưng		'to accept'	See Vietnamese phonology

References

Bibliography