ABSTRACT
The speech process typically referred to as nasalization involves the articulatory lowering of the velum. Nasalization plays a vital role in linguistic sound systems by enabling the contrast between oral and nasal phonemes. Of the world’s languages, 98 percent utilize phonemic consonant nasality, and over a quarter utilize phonemic vowel nasality, in which the velum is lowered during the production of a vowel. This chapter focuses on vowel nasalization. The complexity associated with nasalization generates the potential for sound change and, thus, opportunity to investigate and understand socially conditioned language variation. In this chapter, we explore the complexity of the articulation, acoustics, and perception of vowel nasality. We also outline techniques commonly used to investigate variation across speech communities in the production and perception of nasalization, as well as a case study to demonstrate how research on vowel nasality can reveal patterns of socially conditioned variation.
