Examples of nasals in English are [n], [ŋ] and [m], in words such as nose, bring and mouth.
For example, nasals tend to pattern with other sonorants such as [r] and [l], but in many languages, they may develop from or into stops.
The voiced palatal nasal [ɲ] is a common sound in European languages, such as: Spanish ⟨ñ⟩, French and Italian ⟨gn⟩, Catalan and Hungarian ⟨ny⟩, Czech and Slovak ⟨ň⟩, Polish ⟨ń⟩, Occitan and Portuguese ⟨nh⟩, and (before a vowel) Modern Greek ⟨νι⟩.
Malayalam has a six-fold distinction between /m, n̪, n, ɳ, ɲ, ŋ/ ⟨മ, ന, ഩ, ണ, ഞ, ങ⟩; some speakers also have a /ŋʲ/.
Nuosu also contrasts prenasalised stops and affricates with their voiced, unvoiced, and aspirated versions.
[4] Also, among many younger speakers of Rioplatense Spanish, the palatal nasal has been lost, replaced by a cluster [nj], as in English canyon.
What would be coda nasal occlusives in other West Iberian languages is only slightly pronounced before dental consonants.
The Japanese syllabary kana ん, typically romanized as n and occasionally m, can manifest as one of several different nasal consonants depending on what consonant follows it; this allophone, colloquially written in IPA as /N/, is known as the moraic nasal, per the language's moraic structure.
[7] Yélî Dnye also has an extreme contrast of /m, mʷ, mʲ, mʷʲ, n̪, n̪͡m, n̠, n̠͡m, n̠ʲ, ŋ, ŋʷ, ŋʲ, ŋ͡m/.
Among them are Icelandic, Faroese, Burmese, Jalapa Mazatec, Kildin Sami, Welsh, and Central Alaskan Yup'ik.
Historically, however, *mb became **mm before nasal vowels, and then reduced to *m, leaving the current asymmetric distribution.
Tlingit is usually described as having an unusual, perhaps unique lack of /l/ despite having five lateral obstruents; the older generation could be argued to have /l/ but at the expense of having no nasals.
This is an areal feature, only a few hundred years old, where nasals became voiced stops ([m] became [b], [n] became [d], [ɳ] became [ɖ], [ɲ] became [ɟ], [ŋ] became [g], [ŋʷ] became [gʷ], [ɴ] became [ɢ], etc.)
For example, "Snohomish" is currently pronounced sdohobish, but was transcribed with nasals in the first English-language records.
In the central dialect of the Rotokas language of Bougainville Island, nasals are only used when imitating foreign accents.
This started out in nonstandard dialects and was restricted to the beginning of prosodic units (a common position for fortition), but has expanded to many speakers of the standard language to the beginnings of common words even within prosodic units.