Velar nasal

The velar nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ŋ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N. The velar occurs in English, and it is the sound denoted by the letters "ng" in sing or the letter "n" in bank.

IPA - Unicode	ŋ
IPA - image
X-SAMPA	N
Kirshenbaum	N
Sound sample

Features of this consonant:

• Its manner of articulation is plosive or stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract.
• Its place of articulation is velar which means it is articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the velum).
• Its phonation type is voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.
• It is a nasal consonant, which means
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the center of the tongue, rather than the sides.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

The [ŋ] sound is a fairly common sound cross-linguistically. Many languages have both a set of nasal stops and velar stops have [ŋ]. It is unusual in that in many languages it is only permitted at the ends of syllables, like in English or Korean. However in other languages it is permitted at the beginnings of syllables, like in the name of the language Ngaju Dayak.

Varieties of [ŋ]

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