Nasalizing Vowels and Dropping Nasal Consonants

When a vowel is followed by a nasal consonant, it's very common to nasalize the vowel and then completely drop the nasal consonant. We don't always notice because we hear the nasalization of the vowel and interpret that as the consonant. Usually it's not an issue... but on stage, it can cause a lot of problems with clarity and understandability, which is why performers need to learn how to do a "shadow vowel" so that we can clearly understand the word, especially for a very large space.

---The photo is my dog, Oliver, along with his nose. A little off topic, but totally worth it.

Here's a transcript of the video:

I want to talk about nasal consonants actually happening, because a lot of us just don't do it.

So what often happens is that a vowel before a nasal consonant gets nasalized. So i've talked before about an ash or like an -ing or it could be really any vowel that could happen with this the AH, AHM, AHN, any of these.

Here's the diacritic for saying that it's nasalized, so it's happening through the nose. And this really commonly happens when you've got a nasal consonant after it. Okay.

So that nasal consonant sort of feeds back and makes this nasalized. Now here's the issue: that a lot of people... well, there's a bunch of issues, but this is one issue I want to talk about this time, is that a lot of people actually never quite get to the nasal consonant because they say something like RANG and instead of getting all the way to the ng they just go RANG, RAA... They never make the ng. They never get there.

FIN FII.. FIII... They never actually make the N.

COM COO... COOOO... Yeah. They never actually maybe make that M happen.

So one of the things you need to be aware of, especially for the stage, when you're having to deal with being understood in a much larger space, is making it all the way to these nasal consonants, and if the space is really huge, like coaching opera, for example, that tends to happen in huge spaces, sometimes I need to work with people to do what is commonly called a shadow vowel, where you sort of throw an extra little tiny schwa after it. And I wish a diacritic existed to say a little tiny schwa, a little tiny schwa, so that you could say HANGuh INuh COMuh.

So there's that little tiny off glide of a vowel afterwards to make sure this actually happens.

The big issue is a lot of people don't even do it so instead COM becomes KAA... No M actually happens. It's just a K and an AA thats nasalized. And then they're done with it.

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