nasalised

Nasalised is a term used in phonetics and linguistics to describe sounds produced with airflow through the nose. This occurs when the velum (the soft palate) is lowered, allowing air from the lungs to pass simultaneously through the oral and nasal cavities. Nasalisation commonly affects vowels, but it can also involve consonants in some languages.

In language use, nasalisation can be phonemic, meaning it changes the meaning of a word, or it can be an allophonic, predictable quality arising from the surrounding sounds. Coarticulation often causes vowels to become nasalised when near nasal consonants, a process known as nasal spread or nasal coarticulation. Some languages have nasal vowels as phonemes, where distinct nasal vowels contrast with oral vowels (for example, French and Portuguese).

Notation and examples: In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasalisation is typically shown by a tilde above the vowel symbol, as in [ã], [ỹ], or [õ]. The nasal quality can also be indicated with a separate diacritic. Languages with clear nasal vowels include French, Portuguese, Polish in certain dialects, and many indigenous languages of the Americas. Nasalisation can influence adjacent sounds and may extend across syllable boundaries in some phonologies, a phenomenon known as nasal harmony in particular language families.

Spelling: In English-language texts, the feature is often written as nasalised (British English) or nasalized (American English). Both spellings refer to the same phonetic phenomenon.