A language with most sounds nasalised.

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A language with most sounds nasalised.

Postby Ольга » Thu Dec 29, 2016 1:49 pm

Does such a language exist?
I know that in French some sounds are nasalised.
In Old Russian some vowels were nasalised as well.
But I have never heard about the languages where all the sounds are nasalised.
Does such a language exist? :?:
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Re: A language with most sounds nasalised.

Postby FyrsteSumarenINoreg » Thu Dec 29, 2016 2:20 pm

Breton, Punjabi and Guarani come to mind.
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Re: A language with most sounds nasalised.

Postby Ezy Ryder » Thu Dec 29, 2016 4:08 pm

I heard in some of the American dialects of English, nasalisation is rather common.
In Hokkien, IIRC, pretty much all monophthongs and diphthongs have a nasalised counterpart, not entirely sure about triphthongs.
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Ольга
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Re: A language with most sounds nasalised.

Postby Ольга » Thu Dec 29, 2016 4:25 pm

What about Dutch?
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Re: A language with most sounds nasalised.

Postby Ольга » Thu Dec 29, 2016 4:26 pm

Ezy Ryder wrote:I heard in some of the American dialects of English, nasalisation is rather common.
In Hokkien, IIRC, pretty much all monophthongs and diphthongs have a nasalised counterpart, not entirely sure about triphthongs.

Wow, it's interesting! What kind of dialects?
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Re: A language with most sounds nasalised.

Postby Vedun » Thu Dec 29, 2016 4:42 pm

I presume you mean a language in which all oral vowels have nasal counterparts. Such language is definitely possible and there are many of them. On the other hand a language with all sound nasalised (=a language in which all sounds, vowels and consonats, have nasal pronunciation in some way), while possible, is highly untypical for a natural languages; needless to say, such language doesn't exist.

The World atlas of language structures does have a chapter or vowel nasalistaion, but only about presence vs. absence, not about approximate number of nasalised vowel phonemes. A pity, because otherwise it'd be very easy to see roughly which languages from the database have nasal counterparts to all their oral vowels.

The wikipedia article on nasal vowels lists a few dozens of languages, so maybe look there.
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Re: A language with most sounds nasalised.

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Thu Dec 29, 2016 4:43 pm

Here is some information about vowel nasalisation - http://wals.info/chapter/10
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Re: A language with most sounds nasalised.

Postby tarvos » Thu Dec 29, 2016 6:32 pm

Ольга wrote:What about Dutch?


Dutch has a few nasal consonants. Nasal vowels are generally not used, but may appear in words of French origin, such as "gratin" or "plafond", sometimes as an allophone of the vowel sound + n
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Re: A language with most sounds nasalised.

Postby Xenops » Thu Dec 29, 2016 8:45 pm

I was listening to David J. Peterson's "The Art of Language Invention", and he mentioned that natural languages could have a few nasalized vowels, but they don't outnumber the unnasalized ones. You could construct a purely nasalized language if you want.
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Re: A language with most sounds nasalised.

Postby Spoonary » Thu Dec 29, 2016 11:38 pm

Let's not forget Portuguese. :)
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