| Ipa Symbol: | h̃ |
The voiceless nasal glottal approximant is a type of consonantal sound, a nasal approximant, used in some oral languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is (IPA|h̃), that is, an h with a tilde.
The h sound is nasalized in several languages, apparently due to a connection between glottal and nasal sounds called rhinoglottophilia. Examples of languages where the only h-like sound is nasalized are Krim, Lisu, and Pirahã.
More rarely, a language will contrast oral pronounced as //h// and nasal pronounced as //h̃//. Two such languages are neighboring Bantu languages of Angola and Namibia, Kwangali and Mbukushu. In these languages, vowels following pronounced as //h̃// are nasalized, though nasal vowels do not occur elsewhere. A distinction is also reported from Wolaytta, though in that case the nasal is rare.
| Language | Word | Meaning | Notes | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basque: a'''h'''ate | pronounced as /[ãˈh̃ãte]/ | 'duck' | ||||
| Carapana[1] | '''h'''ʉ̃gẽ́ | [h̃ĩŋɛ̃́] | Allophone of pronounced as /link/ before nasal vowels. | |||
| Kaingang | '''h'''ũg | [h̃ũŋ] | 'hawk' | Possible word-initial realization of /h/ before a nasal vowel. | ||
| '''nh'''o'''nh'''o | pronounced as /[h̃õh̃õ]/ | Tribulus species | ||||
| Khoekhoegowab | Damara dialect | '''h'''û | [h̃ũː] | 'six' | Free variation | |
| Tofa[2] | иʔһён | [iʔh̃jon] | 'twenty' | no separate letter for /h̃/, the same letter is used as the one for /h/. | ||
pronounced as /navigation/