Normative nasalance in Indians speaking Malayalam and Kannada: Influence of native language, gender, and vowels

Background: Normative nasalance values need to be updated frequently to account for dialectal, regional, and linguistic variations across populations. Regular updates ensure the data remains relevant and accurate for clinical assessment and diagnosis. Objectives: The primary objective of the current study was to establish normative nasalance for adults who are native speakers of Malayalam and Kannada using the NasalView system. Furthermore, this study aimed to investigate the influence of language, gender, and stimuli on the nasalance scores. Materials and methods: The study recruited 80 native Malayalam-speaking adults (40 males and 40 females) and 80 native Kannada-speaking adults (40 males and 40 females) between 18 to 24 years of age. The nasalance score were obtained with the NasalView system while the participants phonated vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/. Three trials were conducted for each vowel. The obtained data were tabulated for further analysis. Results: The study revealed significant differences in nasalance values for the vowels /i/ and / u/ between genders and across languages, but not for / a/. The results further revealed that / i/ had the highest nasalance, followed by by/u/ and / a/. Nasalance was significantly different between /i/ and /a/ and between /i/ and /u/ but not between /u/ and /a/. Conclusion: The study has been able to establish nasalance normative for two major Dravidian languages of India that can be used for the clinical diagnosis and management of resonance disorders. Further, it sheds light on the impact of nasalance in geographically diverse multilingual situations.