Voiced dental and alveolar nasals

Common card · No. 202105

A voiced alveolar nasal is a type of consonantal sound used in numerous spoken languages. It is familiar to English-speakers as the ⟨n⟩ sound in nice. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar nasals is ⟨n⟩. The vast majority of languages have either an alveolar or dental nasal. There are a few languages that lack either sound but have [m], such as Yoruba, Palauan, and colloquial Samoan (however, these languages all have [ŋ]. An example of a language without [n] and [ŋ] is Edo). There are some languages (e.g. Rotokas) that lack both [m] and [n]. True dental consonants are relatively uncommon. In the Romance, Dravidian, and Australian languages, n is often called "dental" in the literature. However, the rearmost contact, which gives a consonant its distinctive sound, is actually alveolar or denti-alveolar. The difference between the Romance languages and English is not so much where the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth but the...

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