Phonetics and Phonology of Voiceless Nasals

ABSTRACT Voiceless nasals are cross‐linguistically rare speech sounds that remain understudied compared to their voiced counterparts. However, they offer insights that could refine our understanding of nasal consonant production and voicing patterns. This study provides an overview of the phonetic and phonological characteristics of voiceless nasals in the world's languages. First, we show the distribution of voiceless nasals in the world's languages, revealing that voiceless nasals are found in a variety of language families, although not in many languages. Next, we demonstrate the realization of voiceless nasals, showing that (i) at least two types can be observed from a phonetic perspective, (ii) voiceless nasal phonemes in several languages have allophonic variants, and (iii) several acoustic correlates—such as duration, strength of excitation, and fundamental frequency—are related to the production of voiceless nasals. We also discuss whether a voiceless nasal is a single phoneme or a consonant cluster. In addition, we illustrate that voiceless nasals can occur phonetically even in languages without phonemic voiceless nasals. Lastly, we present a case study of voiceless nasals in Tibeto‐Burman languages of Northeast India, concluding that they are purely voiceless nasals, although several studies have noted that they are aspirated or breathy nasals.