Voiced uvular nasal

Common card · No. 367750

A voiced uvular nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɴ⟩, a small capital version of the Latin letter n. Uvular nasals are rare sounds cross-linguistically, occurring as a phoneme in only a small handful of languages. It is complex in terms of articulation, and also highly marked, as it is inherently difficult to produce a nasal articulation at the uvular point of contact. This difficulty can be said to account for the marked rarity of this sound among the world's languages. A uvular nasal most commonly occurs as a conditioned allophone of other sounds, for example as an allophone of /n/ before a uvular plosive as in Quechua, or as an allophone of /q/ before another nasal consonant as in Selkup. However, it has been reported to exist as an independent phoneme in a small number of languages. Examples include the Klallam language, Tagalog language, the Tawellemmet and Ayr varieties...

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