Pronunciation 2: nasals

Today, we are looking at the nasal sounds of Giriama. These are the sounds made by air coming out of your nose, but not your mouth.



Look at the table below:

Giriama	English	French	Spanish	IPA
m	m	m	m	m
n	n	n	n	n
ny	-	gn as in agneau	ñ as in año	ɲ
ng'	ng as in singer	-	-	ŋ
ng	ng as in finger	-	ng as in domingo	ŋg
mw	-	-	-	ŋ͡m

(The IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet)

m and n

m and n are nice and straightforward. Next!

ny

ny is pronounced as a single sound. Put your tongue in the position for saying y as in yes, then say no - without moving your tongue! You should get a sound like nyo as in French agneau or Spanish año.

If you can't do it, n followed by y is probably close enough!

ng' and ng

Read aloud:

thin
thing
sin
sing
pin
ping

Ok, happy with what 'ng' sounds like?

Now read the following out loud:

singer
finger
banger
anger
ringer

Some of these words just have the ng' sound: singer, banger, ringer. But some have that sound followed by a g: finger, anger.

Written English has no way to distinguish these sounds. But written Giriama does! When you are going to miss off the g, you put an apostrophe after the ng.

So remember:

ng' as in sing'er, ring'er, bang'er

ng as in finger, anger

ng' at the start of words

There are no words in English which start with ng. However, there are words in Giriama which do. For example, ng'ombe, cow.

Practice saying ng'ombe - and maybe ng'a, ng'e, ng'i, ng'o, ng'u - until you are comfortable with it.

Nasals before consonants

In English, nasals can come at the beginning of a syllable: map, nap; and at the end: sim, sin, sing.

In Giriama, they cannot come at the end - every syllable has to end with a vowel. However, they can come at the beginning of the word before certain sounds. Read the following aloud:

mboga	vegetables
mbuzi	goats
ndzala	hunger
ndani	inside
nguwo	clothes
ngira	road

Addition: mw

When I first wrote this post, I was working from a source which did not include the labial-velar sound mw.

Having had a conversation with a Giriama speaker, it turns out that mw, like kw and gw (see Pronunciation of stops), is pronounced simultaneously, not m-then-w.

It sounds like this: Labial-velar_nasal_stop.ogg