What is a uvular nasal?
What are nasals?
Nasals are the sounds that are produced when air flows out of your nasal cavity (nose) but not your oral cavity (mouth).This requires the co-ordination of 3 different things.
Firstly, blow air out of your mouth. If you pinch your nose, this shouldn't change anything. This is because your velum is raised, blocking airflow to your nose.
Your nasal cavity and oral cavity join together above your throat, and the velum is a flap of tissue which stops food and drink going into your nose when you swallow.
For contrast, try breathing out with your mouth closed, whilst pinching your nose. You will feel your nose inflating! Your velum at this point is lowered, allowing air to pass freely.
Ok, your velum is lowered, allowing nasal sounds. But this doesn't stop air flowing out of your mouth. You can demonstrate this by doing both at once - breathe out through your nose and mouth whilst pinching your nose to feel the air flow. You may want to keep a hankerchief handy, though - if you don't pinch hard enough, you're blowing your nose...
Secondly, you need to create a blockage somewhere in the oral cavity. The easiest is to close your mouth! This is the same way you make the sound [p] and [b]. It will give you an [m] sound.
Similarly, using the tip or blade of your tongue, you can make [n], counterpart to [t] and [d], and [ɳ] and [ɲ], which we'll leave for now.
All of these sounds involve blocking the air from leaving your mouth. Putting the blockage in different places changes the way the cavity resonates, giving different sounds.
Thirdly, you need to allow your vocal folds to vibrate. (Unless you are Welsh, and have whispered nasals.) To achieve this, hum. You are now making an [m]!
What is the uvula?
The uvula is the dangly bit at the back of your mouth above the throat.
In linguistics, we label the places that the tongue can block the oral cavity as follows:
bilabial (at lips)
dental (at teeth)
alveolar (at hard ridge behind teeth)
palatal (at hard roof of mouth)
velar (at soft roof of mouth)
uvular (at dangly bit)
pharyngeal (at throat)
As you can see, "uvular" comes below "velar" in the list, meaning that the uvular is closer to the throat than the velum is.
So if you have a blockage at the uvula, how is the air flowing out through the nasal cavity, whose entrance is at the velum?
Here's an MRI of someone pronouncing it. They are facing left. The higher dark stripe is their nasal cavity, and the central one is their oral cavity. You can see an almost spherical blob moving rapidly around - that's their tongue.
As you can see from the video, the closure is made between the back of the tongue and the lowered velum itself! It's too fast to see clearly, but pause the video and click at different points to have a look.
Compare to the uvular stop, where the closure is made with the raised velum:
So there you have it! The uvular nasal.