| Above: | Denasalized |
| Ipa Symbol: | ◌͊ |
| Ipa Number: | 654 |
pronounced as /notice/In phonetics, denasalization is the loss of nasal airflow in a nasal sound.[1] That may be due to speech pathology but also occurs when the sinuses are blocked from a common cold, when it is called a nasal voice, which is not a linguistic term.[2] Acoustically, it is the "absence of the expected nasal resonance."[3] The symbol in the Extended IPA is (IPA|◌͊).
When one speaks with a cold, the nasal passages still function as a resonant cavity so a denasalized nasal pronounced as /[m͊]/ does not sound like a voiced oral stop pronounced as /[b]/, and a denasalized vowel pronounced as /[a͊]/ does not sound like an oral vowel pronounced as /[a]/.
However, there are cases of historical or allophonic denasalization that have produced oral stops. In some languages with nasal vowels, such as Paicĩ, nasal consonants may occur only before nasal vowels; before oral vowels, prenasalized stops are found. That allophonic variation is likely to be from a historical process of partial denasalization.
Similarly, several languages around Puget Sound underwent a process of denasalization about 100 years ago. Except in special speech registers, such as baby talk, the nasals pronounced as /[m, n]/ became the voiced stops pronounced as /[b, d]/. It appears from historical records that there was an intermediate stage in which the stops were prenasalized stops pronounced as /[ᵐb, ⁿd]/ or poststopped nasals pronounced as /[mᵇ, nᵈ]/.
Something similar has occurred with word-initial nasals in Korean; in some contexts, pronounced as //m/, /n// are denasalized to pronounced as /[b, d]/. The process is sometimes represented with the IPA pronounced as /[m͊]/ and pronounced as /[n͊]/, which simply places the IPA pronounced as /◌͊/ denasalization diacritic on pronounced as /[m]/ and pronounced as /[n]/ to show the underlying phoneme.[4]
In speech pathology, practice varies in whether (IPA|m͊) is a partially denasalized pronounced as //m//, with (IPA|b) for full denasalization, or is a target pronounced as //m// whether it is partially denasalized pronounced as /[m͊᪻]/ or a fully denasalized pronounced as /[b]/.[5]