Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

109: On the nose - How the nose shapes language

7 snips
Oct 17, 2025
They dive into why nasal sounds appear in almost every language and how the nasal cavity shapes speech. They explore nasal vowels, odd experimental methods for studying the nose, and surprising anatomy facts. They survey nose-related idioms, gestures like cock-a-snook across Europe, and how signed languages use the nose as a meaningful place.
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INSIGHT

Nasals Are Nearly Universal Sounds

  • Nasal consonants like m, n, and ny are nearly universal cross-linguistically and languages without them are unusual.
  • WALS data shows about 98% of sampled languages have nasals; only ~12 out of 500+ languages lack them, scattered across families.
INSIGHT

Some Languages Have Dozens Of Nasal Contrasts

  • Some languages have very large nasal inventories; Yelidine (Russell Island) reportedly has up to 13 distinct nasal consonants.
  • Its inventory includes co-articulated nasals and place distinctions, producing many contrastive nasal sounds.
INSIGHT

Nasal Vowels Are Common And Often Emerge Historically

  • Nasal vowels occur when air flows through both mouth and nose and about a quarter of sampled languages contrast nasal vowels.
  • Nasal vowels often arise historically from oral vowels before nasal consonants, as in French where the consonant later dropped.
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