Denasalization

In phonetics, denasalization is the loss of nasal airflow in a nasal sound. That may be due to speech pathology but also occurs when the sinuses are blocked from a common cold, when it is called a nasal voice, which is not a linguistic term. Acoustically, it is the "absence of the expected nasal resonance." The symbol in the Extended IPA for partial denasalization is .

When one speaks with a cold, the nasal passages still function as a resonant cavity so a denasalized nasal does not sound like a voiced oral stop , and a denasalized vowel does not sound like an oral vowel .

However, there are cases of historical or allophonic denasalization that have produced oral stops. In some languages with nasal vowels, such as Paicĩ, nasal consonants may occur only before nasal vowels; before oral vowels, prenasalized stops are found. That allophonic variation is likely to be from a historical process of partial denasalization.

Similarly, several languages around Puget Sound underwent a process of denasalization about 100 years ago. Except in special speech registers, such as baby talk, the nasals became the voiced stops . It appears from historical records that there was an intermediate stage in which the stops were prenasalized stops or post-stopped nasals .

Something similar has occurred with word-initial nasals in Korean; in some contexts, are denasalized to . The process is sometimes transcribed as and , with the extIPA diacritic on the underlying phonemes. In phonetic transcription and are intermediate sounds, not fully oral .

In speech pathology, practice has historically varied in whether is a partially denasalized , with for full denasalization, or is a target whether it is partially denasalized or a fully denasalized . However, in 2025 the ExtIPA was revised to clarify that should be used for partial denasalization; a fully denasalized sound should be written .