Voiced velar nasal

Uncommon card · No. 129979

A voiced velar nasal, also known as eng, engma, or agma (from Greek ἆγμα âgma 'fragment'), is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ng in English sing, as well as n before velar consonants as in English and ink. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ŋ⟩. The IPA symbol ⟨ŋ⟩ is similar to ⟨ɳ⟩, the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem, and to ⟨ɲ⟩, the symbol for the palatal nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the left stem. While almost all languages have /m/ and /n/ as phonemes, /ŋ/ is rarer. Half of the 469 languages surveyed in Anderson (2008) had a velar nasal phoneme; as a further curiosity, many of them limit its occurrence to the syllable coda. The velar nasal does not occur in many of the languages of the Americas, the Middle East, or the Caucasus, but it is extremely common among Australian...

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