Voiceless uvular nasal explained

The voiceless uvular nasal is an extremely rare type of consonantal sound, used in very few spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is (IPA|ɴ̥), a combination of the letter for the voiced uvular nasal and a diacritic indicating voicelessness. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N\_0.

There is also the pre-uvular voiceless nasal^[1] in the Mishongnovi dialect of the Hopi language, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical voiceless uvular nasal, though not as front as the prototypical voiceless velar nasal. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have a separate symbol for that sound, though it can be transcribed as ⟨ɴ̟̊⟩ (advanced ⟨ɴ̥⟩), ⟨ŋ̠̊⟩ or ⟨ŋ̊˗⟩ (both symbols denote a retracted ⟨ŋ̊⟩).

Features

Features of the voiceless uvular nasal:

Occurrence

Uvular

Language	Dialect	Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Lamo[2]	Kyilwa
Larong	Tangre Chaya
Drag-yab	Razi

Pre-uvular

See also

• Index of phonetics articles

References

pronounced as /navigation/

Notes and References

1. Instead of "pre-uvular", it can be called "advanced uvular", "fronted uvular", "post-velar", "retracted velar" or "backed velar". For simplicity, this article uses only the term "pre-uvular".
2. Suzuki, Hiroyuki and Tashi Nyima. 2018. Historical relationship among three non-Tibetic languages in Chamdo, TAR. Proceedings of the 51st International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (2018). Kyoto: Kyoto University.