Nasalizing Vowels

There are three nasal consonants that are common for English speakers, but often we carry over that nasality into vowels, especially the vowels that occur before a nasal consonant. Jim walks you through this concept, and how it's noted with the IPA.

Nasalizing Vowels

So vowels can be purely oral, and most of the consonants can be purely oral. What that means is all of the sound coming out through the mouth. And the gateway between the mouth and the nose space is called the soft palate.

So when the soft palate is lifted or closed, all of the sound has to go through the mouth. But when the soft palate is lowered even somewhat, some of the sound or all of the sound could go through the nasal space, especially if you're closing off the mouth space, like you do if you make an M. Mmm. Now plug your nose and do that. Mmm. Your head explodes because all of that sound is coming out through your nose, so you can't plug your nose because you're already closing it at your lips.

Nasal Consonants

So the really common consonants that are nasal consonants that we useare m and n nnn, and the ng ung rung. That ng there at the back: going. That's symbolized by this. So what often happens is that the vowel before that gets nasalized. So whatever it is if it's ing, it will commonly get nasalized, so it starts going partially through the nose in preparation for this nasal consonant, which oftentimes causes some problems unfortunately. When it gets too nasalized, the vowel becomes less recognizable.

This is really problematic when you get to the Ash sound, the ayh ayhng starts to sound like a different vowel all together. "Anger." For a lot of people they think that it's more "enger" instead of anger. Because everything's relaxing a little bit more. "Anger." It happens in a less different, less definite spot, so it becomes really problematic there.

One of the other things that can happen in these instances too is that the ng with this one in a lot of American accents at least, creeps a little bit further forward in the mouth so that GOING sounds more like "goeeng." There's a lot of people across the US who do that. More of an e sound so it becomes more eeng, and that ng happening a little bit further forward in the mouth.

So this is called "nasalization of a vowel" that can start to shift it. Certainly it makes it less distinct because you've got sound traveling out through your nose "uhhh" and through your mouth. It's just less distinct.

You've got all, sort of all this white noise happening, almost all this static sound happening through your nose, and then maybe that distinct vowel through your mouth, but the mix of those, it's like really bad static on a radio. It's so much harder to understand. It's like trying to have a conversation in a loud bar. All that sound drowns out what you're trying to say. And that's what nazalization of vowels means.