| Above: | Nasal release |
| Ipa Symbol: | ◌ⁿ |
| Ipa Number: | 425 |
| Decimal1: | 8319 |
In phonetics, a nasal release is the release of a stop consonant into a nasal. Such sounds are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with superscript nasal letters, for example as pronounced as /[tⁿ]/ in English catnip pronounced as /[ˈkætⁿnɪp]/. In English words such as sudden in which historically the tongue made separate contacts with the alveolar ridge for the pronounced as //d// and pronounced as //n//, pronounced as /[ˈsʌdən]/, many speakers today make only one contact. That is, the pronounced as //d// is released directly into the pronounced as //n//: pronounced as /[ˈsʌdⁿn̩]/. Although this is a minor phonetic detail in English (in fact, it is commonly transcribed as having no audible release: pronounced as /[ˈkæt̚nɪp]/, pronounced as /[ˈsʌd̚n̩]/), nasal release is more important in some other languages.
In some languages, such consonants may occur before vowels and are called prestopped nasals.
Prestopped nasals and prenasalized stops occur when the oral cavity is closed and the nasal cavity is opened by lowering the velum, but the timing of both events does not coincide. A prenasalized stop starts out with a lowered velum that raises during the occlusion, much like the pronounced as /[nd]/ in candy. A postnasalized stop or prestopped nasal begins with a raised velum that lowers during the occlusion. That causes an audible nasal release, as in English sudden.
The Slavic languages are most famous for having (non-phonemic) prestopped nasals. That can be seen in place names such as the Dniester River. The Russian word for "day", for example, is inflected Russian: день, дня, дни, дней pronounced as /[dʲenʲ, dnʲä, dnʲi, dnʲej]/, .
Prestopped nasals area also found in Australia. Eastern Arrernte has both prenasalized stops and prestopped nasals, but it does not have word-initial consonant clusters. Compare pronounced as /[mʷaɻə]/ "good" (with nasal stop), pronounced as /[ᵐbʷaɻə]/ "make" (with prenasalized stop), pronounced as /[ᵖmʷaɻə]/ "coolamon" (with prestopped nasal).
There is little or no phonetic difference between a "prenasalized stop" (pronounced as //ⁿd//) and a cluster (pronounced as //nd//). It is similar for prestopped nasals. The difference is essentially one of phonological analysis. For example, languages with word-initial pronounced as //nd// (or pronounced as //ⁿd//) but no otherword-initial clusters, will often be analyzed as having a unitary prenasalized stop rather than a cluster of nasal + stop. For some languages, it is claimed that a difference exists (often medially) between pronounced as //ⁿd// and pronounced as //nd//. Even in such cases, however, alternative analyses are possible. Ladefoged and Maddieson investigated one such claimed case and concluded that the two sounds were better analyzed as /nd/ and /nnd/, respectively.
However, some languages such as Vietnamese and Malay, which are generally described as having no audible release in final stops, actually have a short nasal release in such cases. Since all final stops in these two languages are voiceless, the nasal release is voiceless as well.
Although the difference is commonly chalked up to aspiration, final nasal release is contrastive in Wolof:[1]
| Aspirated release | ||||
| pronounced as /[lapᵐ̥]/ | 'to drown' | pronounced as /[lapʰ]/ | 'to be thin' | |
| pronounced as /[ɡɔkᵑ̊]/ | 'bridle rope' | pronounced as /[ɡɔkʰ]/ | 'white chalk' |
pronounced as /navigation/