| Above: | Partially denasalized |
| Ipa Symbol: | ◌͊ |
| Ipa Number: | 654 |
| Decimal1: | 842 |
| Imagefile: | IPA Unicode 0x034A.svg |
pronounced as /notice/In phonetics, denasalization is the loss of nasal airflow in a nasal sound.[1] That may be due to speech pathology but also occurs when the sinuses are blocked from a common cold, when it is called a nasal voice, which is not a linguistic term.[2] Acoustically, it is the "absence of the expected nasal resonance."[3] The symbol in the Extended IPA for partial denasalization is (IPA|◌͊).[4]
When one speaks with a cold, the nasal passages still function as a resonant cavity so a denasalized nasal pronounced as /[m͊]/ does not sound like a voiced oral stop pronounced as /[b]/, and a denasalized vowel pronounced as /[a͊]/ does not sound like an oral vowel pronounced as /[a]/.
However, there are cases of historical or allophonic denasalization that have produced oral stops. In some languages with nasal vowels, such as Paicĩ, nasal consonants may occur only before nasal vowels; before oral vowels, prenasalized stops are found. That allophonic variation is likely to be from a historical process of partial denasalization.
Similarly, several languages around Puget Sound underwent a process of denasalization about 100 years ago. Except in special speech registers, such as baby talk, the nasals pronounced as /[m, n]/ became the voiced stops pronounced as /[b, d]/. It appears from historical records that there was an intermediate stage in which the stops were prenasalized stops pronounced as /[ᵐb, ⁿd]/ or post-stopped nasals pronounced as /[mᵇ, nᵈ]/.
Something similar has occurred with word-initial nasals in Korean; in some contexts, pronounced as //m/, /n// are denasalized to pronounced as /[b], [d]/. The process is sometimes transcribed as pronounced as /⟨m͊⟩/ and pronounced as /⟨n͊⟩/, with the extIPA diacritic on the underlying phonemes.[5] In phonetic transcription pronounced as /[m͊]/ and pronounced as /[n͊]/ are intermediate sounds, not fully oral pronounced as /[b], [d]/.
In speech pathology, practice has historically varied in whether (IPA|m͊) is a partially denasalized pronounced as //m//, with (IPA|b) for full denasalization, or is a target pronounced as //m// whether it is partially denasalized pronounced as /[m͊᪻]/ or a fully denasalized pronounced as /[b]/.[6] However, in 2025 the ExtIPA was revised to clarify that (IPA|m͊) should be used for partial denasalization; a fully denasalized sound should be written (IPA|b).[7] Parentheses could still be used around the diacritic to indicate a lesser degree of denasalization, but an example of that was removed from the extIPA chart as being potentially confusing.
