Voiced uvular nasal
A voiced uvular nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is, a small capital version of the Latin letter n.
Uvular nasals are rare sounds cross-linguistically, occurring as a phoneme in only a small handful of languages. It is complex in terms of articulation, and also highly marked, as it is inherently difficult to produce a nasal articulation at the uvular point of contact. This difficulty can be said to account for the marked rarity of this sound among the world's languages.
A uvular nasal most commonly occurs as a conditioned allophone of other sounds, for example as an allophone of before a uvular plosive as in Quechua, or as an allophone of before another nasal consonant as in Selkup. However, it has been reported to exist as an independent phoneme in a small number of languages. Examples include the Klallam language, Tagalog language, the Tawellemmet and Ayr varieties of Tuareg Berber, the Rangakha dialect of Khams Tibetan, at least two dialects of the Bai language, the Papuan language Mapos Buang, and the Chamdo languages: Lamo, Larong sMar, Drag-yab sMar. In Mapos Buang and in the Bai dialects, it contrasts phonemically with a velar nasal. In the Chamdo languages it contrasts phonemically with,, and. The syllable-final nasal in Japanese was traditionally said to be realized as a uvular nasal when utterance-final, but empirical studies have disputed this claim.
There is also a pre-uvular nasal in some languages such as Yanyuwa, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical uvular nasal, though not as front as the prototypical velar nasal. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have a separate symbol for that sound, though it can be transcribed as , or .