Nasal Vowels Across Languages

In most languages, vowels are purely oral—all the air flows through the mouth, and the velum (soft palate) seals off the nasal cavity. Nasal vowels add a twist: the velum lowers during the vowel, letting air simultaneously through the mouth and the nose. The result is a vowel with a distinctive resonant quality that phoneticians mark with a tilde: /ã/, /ẽ/, /õ/. Languages as diverse as French, Portuguese, Yoruba, and Hindi use nasal vowels phonemically.

Nasal Vowels in French and Portuguese

French has four nasal vowels: /ã/ (as in vent, 'wind'), /ɛ̃/ (as in vin, 'wine'), /œ̃/ (as in un, 'one'), and /ɔ̃/ (as in bon, 'good'). Portuguese went even further, developing a richer nasal vowel system that varies considerably between European and Brazilian varieties—a phonetic divergence clearly audible even to non-speakers. Browse the IPA Chart for the full range of nasal vowel symbols and see where they sit in the vowel space.

Nasalisation by Contact

Many languages do not have lexically nasal vowels but do show contextual nasalisation: vowels become nasal when adjacent to nasal consonants like /m/ or /n/. English is a good example. The vowel in ban is phonetically nasalised before the nasal consonant, even though English does not use nasal vowels as separate phonemes. In languages like Hindi and Bengali, by contrast, the same vowel with and without nasalisation can distinguish two different words—making nasalisation a true phonemic feature.

The phonological behaviour of nasal vowels reveals interesting things about syllable structure, vowel harmony, and the timing of articulatory gestures. For language learners, producing a true nasal vowel—rather than a vowel followed by a nasal consonant—often requires conscious effort to keep the velum lowered throughout the vowel's duration. Compare how different Bantu and Romance languages handle nasality using our language comparison tool.