Nasalization

Any discussion of the vowels of NigP would be incomplete without reference to nasalization. Vowels and nasalization are tied together in NigP; it is with vowels that we find nasalization without an adjacent nasal consonant to account for it, as we see in  ‘yes’ and  ‘corn, maize’, and in sentence (3):

Examples such as these raise the question of how to account for nasalization in NigP. We may assume (as did Elugbe and Omamor 1991) that every case of nasalization arises from the presence of an underlying nasal. Such a position would be amply supported by the forms of ‘corn’ cited above. Even  in (3) can be traced to an underlying nasal:   contains a common alternative for , viz. [him]. This analysis also allows us to record nasalization as <n> immediately after the nasalized vowel. The orthographic form of (3) is therefore na in du am.

There are cases in which vowel nasalization affects a preceding consonant:

These examples suggest that [ɲ] and [ŋ^w] are not phonemic and exist only at the systematic phonetic level. Their nasalized approximant alternatives show that there is a general rule by which approximants become nasal (in the case of /j/ and /w/) or nasalized counterparts in the environment of nasalized vowels.

Elugbe and Omamor (1991) claim that /l/ is nasalized before nasalized vowels, but they provide no examples. However, it is a legitimate issue to examine. In examples such as /lεnd/, lend it is probably the case that the surface form is  , , with no nasalization of the [l], or , with nasalization of the lateral. In other words, the approximant nasalization rule affects both lateral and central approximants except that unlike in Yoruba and similar languages, the nasalized allophone of /l/ is not [n], but .