Ng (digraph)

Ng (digraph)

Ng (lowercase: ng) is a digraph of the Latin alphabet. In English and several other European and English-derived orthographies, it generally represents the velar nasal, IPA IPA|ŋ.

It is considered a single letter in many Austronesian languages (Māori, Tagalog, Tongan, Kiribatian, Tuvaluan, Indonesian) and the Welsh language, to represent velar nasal (IPA: IPA|ŋ); and in some African languages (Lingala, Bambara, Wolof) to represent prenasalized IPA|ɡ (IPA|/ŋ͡g/ or IPA|/ⁿg/).

The Finnish language uses the digraph 'ng' to denote the phonemically long velar nasal [IPA|ŋː] in contrast to 'nk' [IPA|ŋk] , which is its "strong" form under consonant gradation, a type of lenition. Weakening /k/ produces an archiphonemic "velar fricative", which, as a velar fricative does not exist in Finnish, is assimilated to the preceding [IPA|ŋ] , producing [IPA|ŋː] . (No /g/ is involved at any point, despite the spelling 'ng'.) The digraph 'ng' is not an independent letter, but it is an exception to the phonemic principle, one of the few in standard Finnish.

In Irish "ng" is used word-initially as the eclipsis of "g" and is pronounced IPA| [ŋ] , e.g. "ár ngalar" IPA| [ɑːɾ ˈŋɑɫəɾ] "our illness" (cf. IPA| [ˈgɑɫəɾ] . In this function it is capitalized "nG", e.g. "i" nG"aillimh" "in Galway".

In Tagalog and other Philippine languages, 'ng' originally represented the sequence IPA| [ŋg] during the Spanish era. The velar nasal, IPA| [ŋ] was represented in a variety of forms, namely: ñg, Unicode|ng̃, gñ (as in Sagñay), Unicode|n͠g, Unicode|g̃, and simply a tilde over the vowel it followed. During the standardization of Tagalog during the early part of the 20th century, 'ng' came to represent IPA| [ŋ] while IPA| [ŋg] was written 'ngg'. Furthermore when the genitive marker "ng" appears on its own it is pronounced IPA| [naŋ] ; this was done to differentiate it from the adverbial marker "nang".

ee also

*Eng (letter)
*Ng (Arabic)


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