I’ve been fascinated by language all my life. Some languages use a lot of nasal sounds (like French gn, Spanish n with tilde). Hindu seems to use it an awful lot. And there are many Indian languages, some from Persian or Arabic. What are the most nasally languages?
I believe women nasalize languages they speak, while men do not. Particularly Spanish and east Asian languages. My theory is that it helps penetrate the background noise of the busy marketplace.
Is that true? Why do women nasalize more?
Hindu is not a language. Loosely translated it is the religion of many Indians.
Hindi is a language mostly spoken in central and western India and it is not Nasal.
None of the Indian languages, I know, are from Persian or Arabic.
Most Indian languages derive from Sanskrit which has the same roots as European languages (hence the term Indo-European Languages).
Sure there are Arabic and Persian words and phrases incorporated in many Indian languages but that is true for many languages.
You could regard Urdu as “Persianized” to some extent, also more generally in a gross sense Persian, Hindustani, and Sanskrit are all Indo-Iranian languages.
“Most nasal” is vague. The highest number of phonemic nasal consonants/vowels? With the highest frequency in actual use? Nonphonemic?
Yanyuwa is highly unusual in that it has a seven-way distinction between [m], [n̪], [n], [ɳ], [ṉ] (palato-alveolar), [ŋ̟] (front velar), and [ŋ̠] (back velar). This may be the only language in existence that contrasts nasals at seven distinct points of articulation.
These languages use phonemic nasal vowels:
[…]
Paicî (an unusually large number of nasal vowels)
I don’t know which language and it’s likely to be several but I noticed that people from south-east Asian countries are extremely nasal. (Laos, Cambodia, etc.) It sounds like everything they say is in the nose and not much coming from the throat or chest.
Hindi is very nasal. Almost every plural is nasalized, and without that it could be singular. I’m blaming auto-correct for changing it to Hindu, which is a religion and not a language.
Hindi contains quite a few words from Persian and Arabic. But is not “from” these languages.
According to Wikipedia (and in my experience) Urdu (the lingua franca in Pakistan) and Hindi (lingua franca in northern India) are both standard forms of Hindustani which is itself a synthetic language of many languages in the region, including a significant portion of Persian and Arabic words. My wife (Indian) and her best friend (Pakistani) converse in their native languages with absolutely no difficulty. They are speaking essentially the same language.
I have always wondered if there are other examples of one language with two different written scripts?
But back to the OP, yes, Hindu-Urdu is very nasal. That is quite clear if you listen to some of the vocal music.
Serbo-Croatian instantly comes to mind. Kazakh. You can see how political decrees come into it. If you include historical scripts, you can come up with many examples, like Turkish, Vietnamese, Mongolian, many others.
ETA there is still one daily Urdu newspaper written by hand! Up until quite recently, there were no computer plugins available to handle complex Nastaliq calligraphy acceptably, especially in Urdu.
Regarding Spanish… Its neighbor, Portuguese, is much more nasal. The tilde specifically indicates nasal; “São Paulo” is supposed to have a solid nasal sound.
French, !Kung, etc. have nasal vowels too, but what is the frequency of their use? We need some data to figure out the contenders for “most nasal language”. E.g., in French words like un, en, on, non, mon are very common.