Nasal Release - Prestopped Nasals

In some languages, such consonants may occur before vowels, and are called prestopped nasals.

Prestopped nasals, and prenasalized stops, occur when the oral cavity is closed, and the nasal cavity is opened by lowering the velum, but the timing of these two events does not coincide. A prenasalized stop starts out with a lowered velum that raises during the occlusion, much like the in candy. A postnasalized stop or prestopped nasal begins with a raised velum that lowers during the occlusion. This causes an audible nasal release, as in English sudden.

The Slavic languages are most famous for having (non-phonemic) prestopped nasals. This can be seen in place names such as the Dniester River. The Russian word for "day", for example, is inflected день, дня, дни, дней, "day, day's, days, days'". (Here the "palatalized" stops are presented as laminal postalveolars.)

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

Note that there is little or no phonetic difference between a "prenasalized stop", e.g. /ⁿd/, and a cluster, e.g. /nd/, and similarly for prestopped nasals. The difference is essentially one of phonological analysis. For example, languages with word-initial /nd/ (or /ⁿd/), but no (other) word-initial clusters, will often be analyzed as having a unitary prenasalized stop rather than a cluster of nasal + stop. For some languages, it is claimed that a difference exists (often medially) between /ⁿd/ and /nd/. Even in such cases, however, alternative analyses are possible. Ladefoged and Maddieson investigated one such claimed case and concluded that the two sounds were better analyzed as /nd/ and /nnd/, respectively.