Voiceless uvular nasal

The voiceless uvular nasal is an extremely rare type of consonantal sound, used in very few spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɴ̥⟩, a combination of the letter for the voiced uvular nasal and a diacritic indicating voicelessness. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is.

There is also the pre-uvular voiceless nasal in the Mishongnovi dialect of the Hopi language, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical voiceless uvular nasal, though not as front as the prototypical voiceless velar nasal. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have a separate symbol for that sound, though it can be transcribed as ⟨ɴ̟̊⟩ (advanced ⟨ɴ̥⟩), ⟨ŋ̠̊⟩ or ⟨ŋ̊˗⟩ (both symbols denote a retracted ⟨ŋ̊⟩).

Features


Features of the voiceless uvular nasal: