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Palatal nasal

Palatal nasal
ɲ
IPA number 118
Encoding
Entity (decimal) ɲ
Unicode (hex) U+0272
X-SAMPA J
Kirshenbaum n^
Braille ⠿ (braille pattern dots-123456)
Sound
Alveolo-palatal nasal
n̠ʲ
ɲ̟
ȵ

The palatal nasal is a type of consonant, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɲ⟩, a lowercase letter n with a leftward-pointing tail protruding from the bottom of the left stem of the letter. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is J. The IPA symbol ⟨ɲ⟩ is similar to ⟨ɳ⟩, the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem, and to ⟨ŋ⟩, the symbol for the velar nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem.

Palatal nasals are more common than the palatal stops [c, ɟ]. In Spanish and languages whose writing systems are influenced by Spanish orthography, this sound is represented with the letter eñe (ñ); the same is true for Occitan, the source of the Portuguese digraph ene-agá (nh), used by languages whose writing systems are influenced by Portuguese orthography, such as Vietnamese; in Catalan, Hungarian and many African languages, as Swahili or Dinka, the digraph ny is used, in Italian is used gn.


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