Learning Accents: Nasality or Twang?

A lot of people think that an accent or dialect is nasal when it isn’t necessarily so! Often times we interpret twang in a voice as being a nasal sound. Here’s where you can learn what’s really going on:

It might help you to look back at a previous post about how the soft palate works, which is the gateway to the nasal space.

Here's a transcript of the video:

Hey there, Jim Johnson for Accent Help. I want to talk a little bit more about the concept of nasal.

There are a lot of dialects that people will say are nasalized or really nasal dialects, and the reality is that they may or may not actually be nasal. If something's nasal it means it's going through the nose, and usually they're implying that it's going through the nose when it shouldn't go through the nose or doesn't have to go through the nose. So that means that this velum or soft pallet is open.

So this is the roof of the mouth, the hard pallet, the bony part, and then the muscular soft pallet, the tongue, and this is the front of the mouth - the Dracula teeth, obviously, and the lips and the nose. So this is the nasal space up here, and when the sound comes up it can either go through the mouth or through the nose or it can go through both. So if this portal is open, it's going through the nose, at least partially.

So when something's really going through both, what you've got is a nasalized sound. So something's becoming nasal when it doesn't necessarily have to be.

Now in that case, yes it's nasal or an individual is nasal.

Most of the time I don't find the dialects or accents are nasal. There may be some exceptions to this, but often times what people call nasal is actually what I commonly use the term twang for. And I've heard it from a few different sources. One of them is the teachings of a a singing teacher Jo Estell, and the twang as as she teaches it, and and this seems accurate as far as I know, is that it happens here at what's called the aryepiglottic sphincter or the ariepiglottic muscle.

So you've got your voice box here, basically your larynx, where the sound's created, and this is your epiglottis. It's a flap that actually will close on the top of your throat, that front part of your throat that leads down to your larynx, it'll close up. And there's a muscle that does that the AES.

So when that muscle actually closes up and tightens up, you get something that becomes this twangy sort of sound that you'll hear a lot in country music twang, or you'll hear it from a lot of people who have that sound that really cuts through. It's a little bit of that Jerry Lewis sort of voice. Hello!

That extreme is a closing off of this, so that this epiglottis actually becomes a little closer to closing this space off, which you close that space off anytime you swallow.

If you put your hand on your throat and swallow, you'll notice your throat seems to go up, right? Your Adams apple or that space there in the larynx. It goes up. And it's also your epiglottis coming down to close it off.

It's so that whatever you're swallowing doesn't go down the wrong pipe, so that it goes down the pipe down to your belly instead of going down to your lungs.

So when this space sort of closes up a little bit more, that is twang. And if an accent has a lot of twang in it, often times people call it nasal. Now funnily enough I find that when people go into a lot of twang, a lot of the times their soft pallet, instead of sort of doming upwards a bit more, which rounds the tone usually, what ends up happening is that it seems to flatten out a little bit more. So even though the sound is not nasal, because it's still closing off this port up through the nasal space, it's got a sound that we associate with nasal because it's got twang in it.

So that's my guess with a lot of dialects that we say have twang, or that we say are nasal, but are actually twangy.