Nasalization - Contextual Nasalization

Contextual Nasalization

Vowels assimilate to surrounding nasal consonants in many languages, such as Thai, creating nasal vowel allophones. Some languages exhibit a nasalization of segments adjacent to phonemic or allophonic nasal vowels, such as Apurinã. Contextual nasalization can lead to the addition of nasal vowel phonemes to a language. This happened in French, where most final consonants disappeared, but where in the case of final nasals, the preceding vowels became nasal, introducing a new distinction into the language. An example where this happened is vin blanc ('white wine'), ultimately from Latin vinum and blancum.