nasal, in phonetics, speech sound in which the airstream passes through the nose as a result of the lowering of the soft palate (velum) at the back of the mouth. In the case of nasal consonants, such as English m, n, and ng (the final sound in “sing”), the mouth is occluded at some point by the lips or tongue and the airstream is expelled entirely through the nose. Sounds in which the airstream is expelled partly through the nose and partly through the mouth are classified as nasalized. Nasalized vowels are common in French (e.g., in vin “wine,” bon “good,” and enfant “child”), Portuguese, and a number of other languages. There are also instances of nasalized consonants in which the feature of nasalization carries over to a typically nonnasal consonant (e.g., the l in French branlant, “shaky”).