What is "denasalization"

n. The process or result of denasalize.

In phonetics, denasalization is the loss of nasal airflow in a nasal sound, such as a nasal consonant or a nasal vowel. That may be due to speech pathology but also occurs when the sinuses are blocked from a common cold, in which case it is called a ' nasal voice'. (The latter is not a linguistic term.) The symbol in the Extended IPA is .

When one speaks with a cold, the nasal passages still function as a resonant cavity so a denasalized nasal does not sound like a voiced oral stop , and a denasalized vowel does not sound like an oral vowel .

However, there are cases of historical or allophonic denasalization that have produced oral stops. In some languages with nasal vowels, such as Paicĩ, nasal consonants may only occur before nasal vowels; but before oral vowels, prenasalized stops are found. This allophonic variation is likely to be from a historical process of partial denasalization. Similarly, several languages around Puget Sound underwent a process of denasalization about one century ago: except in special speech registers, such as baby talk, the nasals became the voiced stops . It appears from historical records that there was an intermediate stage when the stops were prenasalized stops or poststopped nasals . Something similar is currently happening with word-initial nasals in Korean; in some contexts, is neither nor , but .