A Cross-linguistic Survey of Vowel Nasalisation in Non-nasal Environments: An Augmented Taxonomy

Document Type : Original Article

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Department of English, College of Social Sciences, Umm Al-Qura University, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

A centuries-old, seemingly counterintuitive observation made in the study of speech sounds is that a vowel can be nasalised in an environment that lacks an etymological nasal consonant. This phenomenon is known as spontaneous nasalisation, and it has been reported in typologically diverse languages across the world. This study uses data drawn from published sources of 30 languages to build a taxonomy of the non-nasal environments that have been shown to condition vowel nasalisation. Five major types of spontaneous nasalisation have been identified. The study reveals that the non-nasal consonants that have the capacity to induce vowel nasalisation are mostly glottals, pharyngeals, sibilants, and aspirates. The study also reveals that approximant-induced nasalisation is typologically rare; only one out of the 30 languages investigated here is found to exhibit this pattern. Low vowels are found to be particularly susceptible to nasalisation in non-nasal environments. In several languages, vowel nasalisation is found to be prosodically circumscribed. This finding lends support to the proposition that spontaneous nasalisation can be analysed as an edge-effect phenomenon serving to augment prosodic prominence word-initially and improve perceptibility word-finally. Phonetic and phonological explanations for spontaneous nasalisation are also provided.

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