Prenasalized stop

Prenasalized stops are phonetic sequences of nasal plus plosive that behave phonologically like single consonant. That is, like affricates, the reasons for considering these sequences to be single consonants is in their behavior, not in their actual composition.

The Bantu languages are famous for their prenasalized stops, but similar sounds occur across Africa and around the world. Ghana's independence hero Kwame Nkrumah had a prenasalized stop in his name, as does the capital of Chad, N'Djamena. (African prenasalized stops are often hyphenated in European transcription.)An example of the unitary behavior of prenasalized stops is provided by Fijian. In this language, as in many in Melanesia, there is a series of voiceless stops, , and a series of prenasalized stops, , but there are no simple voiced stops, . In addition, Fijian allows prenasalized stops at the beginning of a word, but it does not allow other consonant sequences. Thus the prenasalized stops behave like ordinary consonants.

When Tok Pisin is spoken by people in Papua New Guinea who have similar phonologies in their languages, voiced cononants are prenasalized. For example, the preposition bilong (from English belong) is pronounced by many Melanesians. The prenasalization behaves as a phonetic detail of voicing, rather than a separate segment.

In dialects of northern Japan, standard voiced stops are prenasalized, and voiceless stops are voiced. For example, /itigo/ "strawberry" is in most of the south, but in much of the north.

Prenasalized stops are also found in Australia. The Eastern Arrernte language has both prenasalized stops and prestopped nasals, but does not have any other word-initial consonant clusters. Compare "good", "make", "coolamon".

The Indic languages Sinhala and Dhivehi too have prenasalized stops. The Sinhala alphabet has prenasalized versions of g, ḍ (voiced retroflex plosive), d (voiced dental plosive) and b.