In Spanish it represents a
palatal nasal. This is also the case of
Philippine languages,
Aymara,
Basque,
Bubi language,
Chamorro,
Guarani,
Leonese,
Mapudungún,
Quechua, and
Yavapai, whose orthographies have some basis in that of Spanish as their areas were controlled by Spain at one point. It is also used in
Tetum and
Iñupiaq with the same phonetic value. Many
languages of Senegal also use it in the same way.
Senegal is unique among countries of
West Africa in using this letter. It also represents a palatal nasal in
Galician and
Uruguayan Portuguese. In
Tetum, it was adopted to represent the same sound in Portuguese loanwords represented by , although this is also used in Tetum, as is , influenced by
Indonesian. In
Tagalog,
Visayan, and other
Philippine languages, most Spanish terms that include are respelled with . The conventional exceptions (with considerable variations) are proper names, which usually retain and their original
Spanish or Hispanicised spelling (, , , ). It is
collated as the 15th letter of the
Filipino alphabet. In
old Filipino orthography, the letter was also used, along with , to represent (except at the end of a word, when would be used) if appropriate instead of a tilde, which originally spanned a sequence of and (as in ), such as
pan͠galan ("name"). That is because the old orthography was based on Spanish, and without the tilde,
pangalan would have been pronounced with the sequence (therefore
pang-GAlan). The form became a more common way to represent until the early 20th century, mainly because it was more readily available in typesets than the tilde spanning both letters. It is also used to represent the
velar nasal in
Crimean Tatar and
Nauruan. In
Malay, the
Congress Spelling System (1957–1972) formerly used it for before . In
Turkmen, it was used for until 1999. In
Latin-script writing of the
Tatar language and
Lule Sámi language, is sometimes used as a substitute for
ꞑ (Tatar) or
ŋ (Lule Sámi), which is not available on many computer systems. In addition to Tatar, represents in the
Common Turkic Alphabet. In the
Breton language, it
nasalises the preceding vowel, as in , which corresponds to the French name and has the same pronunciation. It is used in a number of
English terms of Spanish origin, such as
jalapeño,
piña colada,
piñata, and
El Niño. The Spanish word
cañón, however, became naturalized as
canyon (though in
British English it is occasionally spelt
cañon). Until the middle of the 20th century, adapting it as
nn was more common in English, as in the phrase "
Battle of Corunna". Now, it is almost always left unmodified. == Cultural significance ==